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THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



THROUGH ISLE AND 
EMPIRE 

BY THE 

VICOMTE ROBERT D'HUMIERES 



TRANSLATED BY 

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS 



WITH A PREFATORY LETTER BY 

RUDYARD KIPLING 



NEW YORK 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND CO. 

i9°5 



H9 



Printed in Great Britain 

Gift 
Publisher 



All rights reserved 



TO 



HENRY VENN COBB 



CONTENTS 



A Letter by Way of Preface . . ix 

Introduction xiii 

PART THE FIRST 
IN ENGLAND 

I. Arrival — Fog — Echoes of War . . 3 

II. Coronation Time 13 

III. The Wallace Collection ... 24 

IV. Society — Suppers — Sport .... 32 
V. Some Theatres 41 

VI. Some Houses— The Thames . . .5° 

VII. Comparative Manners .... 66 
VIII. Henley — Aldershot — Hampshire — The 

Pool of London 83 

IX. Along the South Coast — A Visit to 

RuDYARD Kipling ..... 92 

PART THE SECOND 
EGYPT 

I. Cadiz— Gibraltar— Spanish Dances . 107 

II. At Sea— Cairo 113 

III. Entertainments 117 

IV. Temples and Tombs 121 

V. The Streets — Hashish — In Lower Egypt 130 



viii CONTENTS 

PART THE THIRD 
INDIA 

CHAP. 

I. At Sea— Calcutta— Gaieties . 
II. Calcutta; The Zoological Gardens— 
The Squalid Quarters . 

III. Hindu India— Benares 

IV. In Rajputana — Jeypore 
V. Moslem India— Old Delhi 

VI. The Mosque of Kutb'ul Islam— The Ruins 

OF TUGHLAKABAD 

VII. The Versailles of Akbar the Great— 

Fatehpur-Sikri 
VIII. The Old Gardens of Kashmir 
IX. The Palaces at Agra and Delhi— The 

Taj Mahal 

X. English India— Hill Stations— Simla 
XI. On the Slopes of the Himalayas— Gul 

MARG , 

XII. A Poet of India . 

XIII. Princes . 

XIV. Kapurthala . 
XV. More Maharajahs 

XVI. Tourists, Portraits and Masques 



PAGE 
141 

178 

186 

194 
209 

216 
229 . 

240 
246 

353 

261 
267 
373 



PART THE FOURTH 
THROUGH DECCAN 

I. Down Towards Southern India . . 285 

II. KarLI— BiJAPUR— PONDICHERRY . . .289 

III. Madras— The Great Pagodas . . .294 



A LETTER BY WAY OF PREFACE 
TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 

My dear Vicomte cCHumieres^ 

Thank you very fmtch indeed for your book 
on the Island a/nd the Empire which I have 
been reading with the greatest enjoyment. 
There are few things m,ore interesting than 
to see ones own country froTn without and 
eyes that are as penetrating {and as merciftd) 
as yours make the interest a keen pleasttre. 

From the point of view of an inhabitant, I 
a'tn specially delighted with your tributes to 
the energy of the race, a thing which some of 
us at times to-day begin to doubt. There 
exists — I am glad you did not see it — an 
England which, ruined by excess of comfort, 
has g07ie to sleep and, because it snores loudly, 
believes that it is thinking. 

Your comments on the Army seem to me 
very just. Above all, you have put your 
finger upon one vital point of our training 



X THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

when you speak of the men who ' ' understand 
that they must not understands I think that 
is at the bottom of many of our successes and 
our failures. It is the first thing which we 
teach our boys. 

Your studies of India were purely de- 
lightful to me, especially those of Rajputana, 
where I wandered once when I was young, 
through Chitor, Jeypore aud the rest. Of 
the South which interested you so much I 
know but little, though a great deal of the 
romance of dead India is there. I wish you 
had seen something of the new India. The 
India of the factory and the railway, the 
oriental moving unperturbed through modern 
machinery and adoring his Gods in the shadow 
of the engine-sheds and the boiler-rooms. It 
is not beautiful, but it is significant. 

Believe me, I agree most cordially with all 
you say on the value of a good understanding 
between our countries ; and this not only for 
the need of to-day, but for the hope of to- 
morrow. The two lands, so it seems to m,e, 
supplement each other in temperament and 
outlook, in logic and fact. Even if this were 
not the case, we must remember that there is 
not so much of liberty left in Eastern Europe 



PREFACE xi 

that the two leaders of Freedom should dare 
to dispute between themselves. We both have 
to deal with the ^'unfrei" peoples, the veiled 
and cramped lands where the word of a king 
is absolute power. If we should quarrel, who 
will profit^ The Middle Ages with the 
m,odern guns. Isn't that true ? 

If I could see you, I could discuss more at 
ease than here a thousand interesting matters 
in your book. Notably what you have ob- 
served of the national coolness of temperament. 
No, our ''chastity " is not all cant. It is an 
administrative necessity forced upon us by the 
density of the population. Imagine a land 
with four hundred people to the square mile — 
if they were penetrated with a refined and 
enduring sensuality I It would be an orgy ! 
It would impede traffic. Consequently, we 
are brief and businesslike in such matters. 
Also it is a meat-fed people, of whom 6,000,000 
{or more than one seventh) live in a city which, 
for five months of the year, swims in semi- 
obscurity alternating with profound darkness. 
We realize that this is exciting to certain 
nerve-centres and we — the land — take exercise 
to counteract the stimulus. " We understand 
that we must not understand." To under- 



xii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

stand everything may be to pardon everything, 
but it also means to C07nmit everything. 

I have only one complaint to make, but it 
is a serious one. In your book you have 
said that I adore Offenbach ! / am, not a 
musician, but even I have soine dim knowledge 
of pleasing sounds and I fear you must have 
•misunderstood me. JVo, not Offenbach, never 
Offenbach. Except on a barrel-organ, as a 
relief to the songs of the music-halls, my own 
perhaps ! 

I would sooner be the " aggressive im- 
perialist " of fiction than an adorer of 
Offenbach. 

Very sincerely yours, 

RuDYARD Kipling. 

Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex, Aug. 7, 1904. 



INTRODUCTION 



None will dispute that it is to the ad- 
vantage of nations to know one another. 
The advantage becomes more positive when 
the object of our study is a neighbouring 
people whose civilization is influencing or 
must come to influence our own. And the 
advantage becomes one of the first order 
when, as now, the nation in question has but 
lately united itself to us by a compact, even 
though it were a purely utilitarian compact. 

Any contribution towards this task of en- 
lightening one's fellow countrymen as regards 
the souls and motives of a neighbouring race 
is useful and opportune. It is a case, in 
fact, of dispelling heavy and inveterate 
shadows of ignorance and misunderstanding. 
The humblest spark can lead us one step 
forward. Herein lies the excuse for this 
book. 



xiv THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

It has no pretensions to academic harmony, 
to historical impartiality or to sociological 
serenity. It is a collection of impressions. 
Only, these are not quite the same that would 
be jotted down by a hurried or inattentive 
traveller. They have undergone the process 
of sorting rendered inevitable by the repeti- 
tion of the same visits, by an increasing 
familiarity with persons and things, by long- 
continued sojourning, by the proof of men 
and views, by the study of books and the soil. 
These sketches represent in an imperfect 
and epitomized form the spoils of many 
journeys to England in the course of 
the last ten years, of two winters spent in 
Egypt and of a fifteen months' stay in India 
and Central Asia. In their variety, which 
will sometimes appear incoherent, the reader 
will perhaps discern a continuity of preoccu- 
pation : the psychology of the Englishman, 
both at home, in the midst of his traditions, 
and abroad, in the midst of adventure, in con- 
tact with different environments and peoples ; 
as in India, for instance, where he re-enacts 
daily, in his relations with the subject race, 
the memorable meeting of Alexander and the 
Gymnosophist, as told to us in the narrative 



INTRODUCTION xv 

of the Greek historian : action and vision face 
to face and dumb. 

The endeavour, therefore, of these pages 
is to give an idea of EngHsh life as seen from 
within rather than as observed from without. 
But I should not consider that I had com- 
pleted the book which I have in mind if to 
these documents, which are in a measure 
abstract and inconclusive, I did not add some 
of the reasons why the group of mankind 
which the Anglo-Saxon race represents ap- 
pears to me worthy, above all others, of our 
philosophic attention and our social esteem 
(as an eminently valid and hardy shoot of 
the specific tree) and well-suited to complete 
by its master faculties our natural gifts thrown 
into the common stock. It would be interest- 
ing to establish that the understanding which 
has just been effected is prompted not only 
by frail and perishable motives of convenience, 
but by more profound reasons derived from 
the respective temperaments of the two races 
and to draw an inference as to the future of 
this union (in spite of provisional denials) and 
the great lesson which the world can gain 
from a realized alliance of this novel kind. 
Lastly, by way of a first homage to that 



xvi THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

English practical sense from which we have 
so much to learn, it would perhaps be well, 
in passing, to suggest a few preliminary- 
actions, a few points of etiquette, useful little 
pieces of advice to prevent misunderstanding 
at the outset. I will try to indicate in advance 
the points at which there is a danger of our 
characters clashing, the occasions of distrust 
that have to be overcome, the feelings to be 
conciliated. There could be nothing more 
delicate nor more useful to be effected be- 
tween two races which would complement 
each other less well if they resembled each 
other more. 

It is here no question of idle panegyric 
or sentimental declamation. I would estab- 
lish that the business has a great chance of 
benefiting the contracting parties and even 
conducing, in a more or less near future, to 
the general civilization of the world. I would 
reconcile the profound instinct which brings 
the two races together with the greater, the 
supreme instinct which is that of their pre- 
servation ; I would look beyond the present 
and show the compact of yesterday becoming, 
for both nations, a guarantee of lasting 
strength and, for humanity, perhaps, the first 



INTRODUCTION xvi 

memorable example of an alliance already 
consecrated by geographical proximity, by 
kinship of institutions and blood, by reci- 
procal commercial advantage, an alliance 
from which we may one day expect an order 
of more intimate, more healthy and more 
general spiritual exchanges. 



I can only summarily remind the reader of 
the reasons for which the English people 
presents an eminent type of the human 
species. Its constitution, which was praised 
by Montesquieu more than 150 years ago, its 
laws, an unequalled example of the adapta- 
tion of the political machine to the needs of 
the individual, imply the higher utilization of 
all the energies of the country. The aristo- 
cracy plays a preponderating part and yet its 
privileges do not cause it to forget its duties ; 
moreover, it is open to all-comers : intellectual, 
military, industrial magnates rise to it, so to 
speak, mechanically, just as its younger sons 
fall back into the commonalty. It is an ideal 
which is constantly held forth,* which is in 

^' H. G. W^ELLS : Mankind in the Making, chap. v. 



xviii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

no way unattainable, which creates emulation 
instead of creating envy. Lastly, it has not 
the ridiculous note of poverty. 

The idea of fortune is logically allied with 
that of aristocracy. The great preblem, how 
to transfer the powers of the aristocracy of 
birth, to-day in its decline, to the aristocracy 
of money, is here easily solved. Money riibs 
off its dirt at the contact of those of whom it 
has become the " peer: " this does not happen 
in America, which contains no inspiring model, 
nor in France, where, indeed, it seems as if 
the aristocracy, nowadays, took its tone from 
money. 

As for the people, it would be difficult to 
assert that it is happier here than elsewhere, 
but at least it does not exhaust itself in 
hatreds and revolts and it is deeply imbued 
with a sense of the necessary inequality of 
social positions, which corresponds with that 
of human faculties. In any case, it is assured 
of two supreme benefits : liberty and justice. 
The respect that surrounds a magistracy 
above suspicion (observe the expression of 
an Englishman in whose presence a French- 
man indulges in the jests current among our 
people concerning the morality of the judges 



INTRODUCTION xix 

of our Courts of Appeal and of Error : he 
will be profoundly scandalized) hallows a 
system of law from which, through all the 
lumber of its antiquated doctrines, shines an 
admirable regard for the sacred rights of 
the individual. 

The race is a fine one, full of vigour and 
tenacity and combining both idealism and 
realism. The most marked characteristics 
of its men appear to be stoicism, the practice 
of truth, a sense of respect and hence of duty, 
generosity. In short, the Englishman pre- 
sents a good specimen of the physical and 
moral individual in a society which espouses 
his wants and exalts his energies to the 
highest point in order to attain the best 
possible result. 

None of all this is new. These summary 
outlines were necessary, however. The 
complete picture will be found in Taine's 
fine studies, those models of intelligence and 
impartiality, which, from the author's mental 
habit, the date at which he wrote them and 
the circumstances in which they appeared, 
admitted of but one tacit conclusion. 



XX THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



3 

It would be of a more immediate interest 
to forestall the common objections and to 
endeavour to correct the more stubborn 
prejudices that separate the two nations. 
What are the favourite reproaches which 
we are accustomed to aim at the English 
character ? 

The reproach of egoism contains nearly- 
all of them. It is marked by a sort of 
childish sophistry at the start, because it 
applies the old formulas of individual 
morality to those aggregations of individuals 
known as nations ; and this constitutes a 
first cause of error. Imagine a nation that 
should be "meek and lowly in heart," that 
should "love its neighbour as itself," that 
should *' turn the other cheek also," or 
practise only the elements of Gospel 
morality ! The picture is absurd. The 
Emperor William II., a subtle exegetist and 
an irreproachable Christian, would find in 
the development of this idea an excellent 
subject for his next speech of welcome to 
the recruits of the German Empire. 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

I do not mean to say that this moraHty — 
that of asceticism, of the ancient odium 
generis humani — is any better adapted, in 
the era which is now commencing, to the 
individual than to the country. Its formula, 
discussed on every hand, has no longer over 
our minds the empire which it retains over 
our hearts. A noble action does, in fact, 
necessarily imply a sacrifice for our moral 
and aesthetic exigencies. Modern wisdom 
will still have a great difficulty in rendering 
palatable this simple truth, namely that an 
ideal can be disinterested only on pain of 
being unfruitful. 



Under which forms does this English 
egoism chiefly offend against that pure model 
of disinterestedness and altruism offered by 
the French burgess of our Third Republic ? 

That which strikes him first is, perhaps, 
disloyalty. He complains of having been 
"done," he fears lest he should be **done" 
again. The revolts of sentiment pale beside 
this grave, primordial objection. 

** Perfidious Albion" is a phrase invented 
by the pamphleteers whom Napoleon loyally 



xxii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

kept to besmirch the British dynasty and 
parUament. It made a great hit. It covered 
all the defeats due to the incapacity or 
improvidence of our governments in their 
relations with England. One of the most 
venerable stereotypes of our newspaper press 
represents us, at different historical moments, 
as "pulling the chestnuts out of the fire" for 
a greedy and faithless ally, whereas there 
would have been more just grounds for 
blaming our own inability to see, in a given 
situation, the real advantages that escaped 
us, in the Crimea or Egypt, for instance. 
We console ourselves by objurgating a more 
prudent accomplice and recognizing in our- 
selves a superior, though somewhat belated 
honesty. One is mindful of that phrase of 
Laclos' which I have already quoted in the 
text of this book : 

" That is so like men ! All equally rascally 
in their designs, the weakness which they 
display in the execution they christen 
probity." 

Without pretending to confer upon Eng- 
land a monopoly to which she does not 
herself lay claim, I may say that the love 
and practice of " fair play " (a sort of middle- 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

class chivalry) and of truth, those pronounced 
characteristics of modern English education 
and manners, have made their way into her 
political morals. Lord Curzon, for instance, 
furnishes an instructive type of that new 
generation of statesmen, endowed with bolder 
tendencies, a love of clear and swift solu- 
tions, a professed abhorrence of the diplomatic 
lie (see the preface to his book on Persia), a 
frankness which is the natural luxury of 
strength.^ I know not that Mr. Chamber- 

* That famous British perfidy appears very harmless in 
the face of the methods of certain rival Powers. Albion 
is an artless school-girl beside Russia. To prove this, I 
will quote the arguments which Lord Curzon uses to 
establish the reality of the Russian peril with regard to 
India. These are the plan for the joint expedition against 
India designed by Napoleon and the Emperor Paul ; that 
of Skobeleff; that of Kuropatkin, the military heir of 
Skobeleff, who is the leading exponent of Central-Asian 
tactics in the Russian army and whose movements in 
the Russo-Japanese war England has every sort of reason 
for following with interest ; the written testimony of 
M. Zinovieflf, the head of the Asiatic Department of the 
Russian Foreign Office, admitting the political object of 
making an impression on England and checking her 
attempts against Russia's expeditions and progress ; 
down to, lastly, the documents discovered at Kabul in 
1879: the letters from General Stolietoff to the Amir of 
Afghanistan, provoking the latter, after the signature of 
the treaty of Berlin, " to treat the English with deceit and 
fraud," which Russia was to render fruitful by her support. 



xxiv THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Iain has ever been taxed with perfidy. He 
represents rather an extreme type of the 
opposite tendencies which we will now pro- 
ceed to examine. 

5 
In default of cunning, one readily accuses 
England of harshness, pride and cruelty in 
her methods towards other countries, neigh- 
bouring or subject. Upon what are these 
accusations founded ."^ Let us examine the 
gravest. The Irish question first presents 
itself : a complicated question, heart-rending, 
difficult to judge with coolness, It would 
seem as though England, after the brutalities 
of conquest, remained inert rather than 
hostile in the face of the problem set before 
her. Certainly, this inertia is none the less 
to be condemned ; but such movements of 
opinion as the Home Rule campaign and 
such accomplished facts as the recent agrarian 

Stolietoff was sent by General Kaufmann, the Governor- 
general of Tashkent, and the machination contrived by 
these two worthy soldiers was a master-piece of duplicity 
fit for the dreams of veteran diplomatists. Russia, for 
the rest, abandoned the Amir whom she had duped and 
"the good faith of Russia has never on either side in 
English politics found an honest spokesman since." 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

reforms of Mr. George Wyndham (which 
possibly mark the date of a real renascence 
for Ireland) have closed this phase and rele- 
gated the memories of hatred and oppression 
to that past in whose depths every nation 
hears the voice of remorse. 

There is also the problem of India, where 
publicists, travellers and artists have allotted 
to England a direct responsibility for the 
ravages of famine. It would need a volume 
to study the question whether the sum total 
of welfare, justice and prosperity has increased 
in India under British sway. It seems im- 
possible to deny it, notwithstanding the 
inevitable shadows on that huge picture. 
But new necessities have arisen. That 
swarm of humanity, due precisely to the 
security and the benefits of the English 
administration, is unable, subject as it is to 
the capricious rains, to solve the problem of 
its existence. England appears to be no 
more responsible for this calamity than 
France for the eruptions in Martinique. 
This is the conclusion that follows from the 
learned articles of M. Chailley-Bert on the 
immense network of canals of irrigation in 
India, from M. Albert Matin's lucid econo- 



xxvi THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

mical studies and, to mention some English 
sources, from the valuable information which 
I owe to the obliging kindness of Mr. H. 
Seymour Trower, the president of the Navy 
League, and of Sir William Lee- Warner, of 
the Indian Council 

Private initiative has sent considerable 
sums from England for the starving natives, 
of whom the greater number have been saved 
by the Famine Relief Works. I could men- 
tion poor members of the Indian Civil Service 
who have given up an important part of their 
pay for the relief of the same unfortunate 
people. Nevertheless, we read, in a book on 
India published in French (though not written 
by a Frenchman), such lies a§ the asser- 
tion that the Anglo-Indian officials receive 
additional allowances in times of scarcity! 
Man still remains powe'^jlfess before the sport 
of the eternal laws that grjnd him down until 
he masters them. Bad faith, chattering 
imbecility, a certain sensuous pleasure in 
compassion all insolently make it their busi- 
ness to distribute the causes and effects of 
the most obscure phenomena, in whose 
presence true knowledge remains thoughtful. 

Public charity, on the other hand, in 



INTRODUCTION xxvii 

England herself, is exercised with a fulness 
which we have no right to grudge. Immense 
hospitals exist by the generosity of private 
individuals. No one can deny that the En- 
glishman is a greater giver than the French- 
man. He is also more humane. No people 
displays so much solicitude for animals. The 
barbarism of the Spaniard or the oriental is 
unknown to him. Every tourist has seen, in 
the streets of Naples and Cairo, exhortations 
to show kindness to the beasts, watering- 
troughs set up for their benefit, both due to 
English initiative. This characteristic is not 
without its beauty. 

I will add that England does not number 
among her institutions such standing re- 
proaches as those schools of miscreants and 
desperadoes which we call disciplinary com- 
panies. A nation that tolerates such adjuncts 
to the liberties which it has proclaimed has 
no right to pass censure upon any other. 



To return to English "egoism," it assumes, 
we say, other and mitigated forms upon 
which our prejudices bestow the names of 



xxviii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

"haughtiness" or "coldness." This needs 
explanation. 

Nothing is more disconcerting and afflicting 
to our expansive (sometimes theatrically ex- 
pansive) natures than that English reserve 
which is nothing but the modesty of certain 
manly feelings, a superlative delicacy in re- 
fined souls, a scruple which at least dictates an 
incontestably noble attitude, despite its stiff- 
ness, to the average man. 

It would be essential to remove the mis- 
conception created by a false interpretation 
of that "human respect"(an exactly expressive 
phrase) which screens the Anglo-Saxon's soul 
and causes him to dislike excessive gestures, 
sentimental quaverings, rhetorical or moral 
mummeries. This characteristic has its origin 
in a strong inner discipline, a certain sluggish- 
ness of imagination, a feeling for the *' style " 
that best suits the obstinate rather than 
passionate genius of the English. They have 
promoted this tendency to the rank of a 
virtue and with profound reason. If its dis- 
creetness does not increase the charms of 
sociability or the easy confidence necessary 
for ordinary worldly relations, it gives guar- 
antees against indiscretion, favours the home 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

life (among subjects susceptible to it, for, 
obviously, self-control is of value only among 
individuals endowed with a self to control) 
and imparts dignity, security and elegance to 
the life away from home. Every Frenchman 
who has had experience of England admits 
this. It is only fair to say that these qualities 
are common to all aristocratic culture. Our 
own possessed them, with an easy grace added. 
But we retain only the vestiges. Our demo- 
cracy will perhaps look upon lessons taken 
from another country with less suspicion than 
upon those derived from traditions which it 
abhors and which it has but too well succeeded 
in forgetting. 

Note that the Englishman does not maintain 
this reserve so strictly towards the foreigner 
as towards his own kind. It is not the solemn 
and supercilious distrust which we imagine to 
be kept up for the exclusive benefit of the 
alien, but a general attitude. To us it appears 
inconceivable that members of the same club, 
meeting day after day for twenty years or 
more, should not know such elementary facts 
regarding one another's lives as whether, 
for instance, they be married or unmarried. 
This occurs, however. Two intimate friends 



XXX THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

who are separating for years, with a prospect 
before them of adventures, of dangers, of prob- 
able death, will display a stoical dandyism 
in talking, up to the last moment and to the 
parting pressure of the hand, upon indifferent 
subjects. Whichever we may prefer, we are 
bound to allow more dignity to this power of 
self-government than to the exuberance of 
the Neapolitan. The latter perhaps adds to 
the picturesqueness of mankind, the former 
certainly adds to its greatness. 

Moreover, although this mask often covers 
vulgar souls, it also sometimes conceals the 
most delicate sensibility, an exquisite freshness 
of soul and of spiritual bloom, an engaging 
manly simplicity, a confidence yielded with an 
unconstraint and a loyalty that never belie 
themselves. And it is not a paradox to de- 
clare that the Englishman will perhaps raise 
this mask more willingly for a sympathetic 
foreigner, one speaking his language and 
appreciating his country, with whom he dares 
for a moment to unlace the harness of some- 
what artificial constraint and convention in 
which the etiquette of his education confines 
him in the presence of his fellow-countrymen. 
The relations of friendship of this kind which 



INTRODUCTION xxxi 

I have known and experienced have always 
left a lasting and kindly memory with the 
men whom they bound together. It is through 
meetings of this kind that the elect form the 
most profitable connexions : they usher in 
wider and more effective sympathies. It 
does, in fact, seem difficult to believe, look- 
ing at the progress which has been achieved, 
that the relations between peoples should 
remain for ever regulated by the same primi- 
tive instincts that cause the ferine to fling 
itself upon its rival or its prey and that the 
only advance made upon the methods of the 
stone age should be a mercenary alliance or 
a competition at the point of the sword. 



7 
English reserve, as it displays itself or 
rather shrinks back in sobriety of gesture, 
rarity of speech and reticence in broaching 
any personal subject, appears to us so strange 
that, in default of coldness, we tax it with 
being hypocritical. This brings us to the 
chapter of the hypocrisy of the English ! 
How often have we not heard this reproach 
uttered against our neighbours ? An im- 



xxxii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

portant portion of our halfpenny press 
would be starved, if this other old stereo- 
type were taken from it. This hypocrisy, 
superimposed ^upon the avowed worship of 
frankness, of fair play which I have just set 
forth, appears to us a refinement of duplicity. 
At first sight, our repugnance is justifiable. 
There is no greater effort of impartiality 
possible to a French brain than to explain 
cant and make excuses for it. Its roots 
touch the gloomiest conceptions of primitive 
reason : the savage's terror before the im- 
placable Moloch. I spoke above of the love 
of fair play as a sort of middle-class chivalry : 
one might say of cant that it is a middle- 
class asceticism. It is an asceticism stripped 
not of its cruelty, but of its mysticism and its 
picturesqueness, an asceticism that has per- 
formed the feat of reconciling itself and its 
dogmas with affirmed piratical instincts and 
of installing the Ark of the Covenant and 
the Cherubim of the Old Law on board the 
beaked galleys of the ancestral Vikings. 
Wherefore cant, ridiculous and futile in its 
essence and its origin, burdened with every 
crime since the death of that truculent and 
genial Elizabethan England, the England of 



INTRODUCTION xxxiii 

Marlowe, Webster and Shakspeare, from the 
murder of Mary Stuart, that bright and 
passionate figure of the Renascence hated by 
the Scotch preachers, down to the exile of 
Byron and Shelley, the ostracism that struck 
a Swinburne, the gaol that opened to receive 
a Wilde, the political ruin of a Parnell con- 
victed of adultery, this cant is to us abomin- 
able. It is, moreover, equally ridiculous in 
its fruits, for, in the extreme classes of 
English society, the highest and the lowest, 
it does not don a morality superior to that of 
other nations. There remains the middle 
class, the fount of the living strength of the 
country, which is still imbued with puritanical 
traditions, although its ideas are growing 
broader day by day. Well, it is difficult not 
to admit that, in this class above all, the 
excesses of cant represent the defects of 
valuable social qualities. Upon the whole, 
he who boasts of his virtue is better than he 
who boasts of his vices, although we must 
first determine the constantly changing sense 
of the words vice and virtue. England has 
not cleansed of the old sediments of asceti- 
cism those jars in which they still adulterate 
the wine of the new vintages. But she keeps 



xxxiv THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the jars. In France, we have only the press 
in which we dance crowned with vine-leaves, 
drunk, vainly drunk with the new wine of 
ideas that runs away and is lost. 

Yes, this hypocrisy is the sign of a great 
respect for good. Only, it is the good of 
yesterday to which it is subjected by a farce 
which to us appears vile and which, in reality, 
is pious. In any case, it is provisional, for 
this good defined according to the formulas 
of future morality, that which is being elabo- 
rated at the bottom of the crucibles and under 
the lens of the microscopes, this good, once 
that it is proclaimed, will obtain an adhesion 
that will cost no effort to man's sincerity. 
The apparent lie takes its origin in a loyalty 
which men lay upon themselves towards the 
divine images and authorities of the past, at 
a time when they are being entreated by all 
the forces, all the aspirations, all the august 
impatiences of the future. I think that, 
possibly, England may one day owe to us, 
to the daring and fervour of our researches 
and our thought, the contents of a new duty. 
We will return to this presently. 



INTRODUCTION xxxv 



8 

There still remains the worship of money, 
the importance attached to money-making — 
that which Napoleon implied when he called 
his enemies a nation of shop-keepers — among 
the features which the English themselves 
are inclined to disparage in their own 
civilization. 

It might, however, be brought back to 
this, that it is the most modern manifesta- 
tion, the manifestation most immediately 
permissible and most ultimately fruitful of 
the ancient will to live. I see in it the 
lawful recognition of the most potent factor 
of our latter-day civilization. Money, in 
fact, is the symbol in which modern man 
concentrates and salutes his most vigorous 
hope and his most eager desire of life and 
strength. Gold is the most recent, the most 
urgent sign of the will of power. This sign 
was formerly the sword or the keys. To-day, 
the Caesar, the priest abdicate in favour of 
gold ; from the decrepitude of those once 
redoubtable forces the new master rises amid 
hypocritical hootings. This fact cannot be 



xxxvi THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

discussed ; it can only be accepted. It jars 
upon the most sacred beliefs of our inherit- 
ance, but we cannot order the morrow. A 
new morality will arise : it is already 
dawning. Wealth will have its duties and 
its saints. Art, the eternal laggard, will 
follow, no doubt, and some genius of the 
opening century will come, amid the magic 
of a work as colossal as Der Ring des 
Nidelungen, to release the gold from the curse 
of Alberich ! 

Our present duty is to thrust back our 
hereditary dislikes and to prepare, for the 
greatest conceivable good, the new universe 
which is being imposed upon our sons. Gold 
must be stamped with the effigy not only of 
appetites, but also of ideals, of every ideal. 
Gold rewards, as yet, only craft, economy, 
business instinct. It creates only a doubtful 
aristocracy. Every sort of superiority will 
have to owe its consecration to it. It will 
make duties for itself, in a manner auto- 
matically, before the threatening socialism. 
Capital can obtain safety only by paying 
tribute to the other forces of the race. It is 
a striking fact that this new conception of 
the duties of gold has appeared and is taking 



INTRODUCTION xxxvii 

shape in England and America. Cases in 
point are the will of Cecil Rhodes, the en- 
dowments of Mr. Andrew Carnegie and of 
so many other millionaires. These do great 
honour to the Anglo-Saxon race. A moral 
system which is formed not after an abuse 
nor under the incentive of an urgent neces- 
sity, but by the spontaneous impulse of 
generous minds constitutes progress. It is, 
therefore, a very correct sense of realities 
that tends, in England, to associate fortune 
with success in every career and also to 
crown fortune with honours. They bestow 
a financial reward upon a lucky general and 
raise a wealthy brewer to the peerage. In 
this way, the aristocracy is renewed. In 
this way, money is ennobled. These are 
harmonious exchanges of the future and the 
past which guarantee the health of the social 
organism, even as the harmony of the 
physiological exchanges ensures the health 
of the body. 

9 
I should like to close the chapter of 
grievances which certain persons persist in 
pleading against England with a few words 



xxxviii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

on imperialism. The word sums up the 
majority of the foregoing accusations and 
concretes them under the appearance of a 
sort of new cult which we love to picture as 
aggressive and voracious. Certainly, the 
instinct which it adorns with a fascinating 
label has allowed itself, like all vigorous 
instincts, to be carried towards excesses at 
which a thinker like Spencer, for instance, 
had every right to be afflicted.* No 
philosopher can praise the development of 
brutal appetites, the recrudescence of mili- 
tarism, an apparent retrogression towards 
barbarism These, however, are only the 
first reactions of too lively a feeling on souls 
too primitive, something like the inherited 
gesture of carrying the hand to the sword at 
the appearance of the stranger, which hand 
is held out after the act has been linked with 
reflection. 

Let us rather try to represent the purified 
conception which the choicer among our 
neighbours across the Channel form of a 
dogma which, for them, conceals neither 
pride nor the lust of conquest, but expresses 
only a higher mission that has devolved 

* Herbert Spencer : Facts and Comments (passim). 



INTRODUCTION xxxix 

upon England for the good of humanity. 
Lord Curzon does not hesitate to write, at 
the head of his Problems of the Far East : 

" To those who believe that the British 
Empire is, under Providence, the greatest 
instrument for good that the world has seen 
and who hold, with the writer, that its work 
in the Far East is not yet accomplished this 
book is inscribed." 

That is clear and distinct. 

Some months ago, in an article devoted 
to Lord Curzon, the present writer ventured 
to make the following reflections : 

" There is no more interesting phenomenon 
in the history of modern England than this 
opportune crystallization of an altruistic ideal 
and this anxiety to dignify her aspirations. 
Its interest seems greater yet from the 
speculative point of view : never did a better 
opportunity offer for studying the origin of 
moral systems. In so doing, one is exposed 
to the temptation of an irony all too easy. 
In no case could this be addressed to any 
particular nationality to the exclusion of the 



xl THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Others. Ancient moralists contended that 
love was based upon esteem : humbler than 
the love of individuals, the love of nations, 
to whose coming all thought worthy of the 
name looks forward, must learn, to begin 
with, to be satisfied with less. No social 
group has the exclusive privilege of virtue 
or of disinterestedness, any more than the 
right to disparage others. Among the more 
powerful groups, their very power exposes 
more greatly to criticism their methods of 
self-preservation and extension ; it seems 
more dignified to look with the composure 
of scientific observation upon the working 
of these totalities and not to give ear to the 
slightest suspicion of that sentiment which is as 
ugly as it is unphilosophic : I mean jealousy. 
" Here are the facts. A race endowed with 
adventurous and commercial instincts has 
seen these hereditary impulses aroused for 
more than a century by the conquest of India. 
An enormous field is opened to its enterprise, 
a field in which all its energies stand self- 
revealed, become inured, multiply and, lastly, 
seek new outlets. The conception of the 
British Empire appears, takes shape, is 
anxious as to its legitimacy. There is a 



\ 



INTRODUCTION xli 

question of presenting to the world the new- 
born imperialism, rugged as yet of aspect, 
far from reassuring for the greater part . . . 
O joy, 'twas a Messiah ! Peace to men of 
good-will. 

" And let no short-sighted sceptic come to 
sum up his impression in such phrases as that 
England has become rich enough to pay for 
an ideal, or make unkind comparisons with 
those old financiers to whom a belated honesty 
is only a more expensive luxury. No ; in 
insisting upon her civilizing task, the most 
marvellous thing is that England may be 
right. In landing her bales and starting her 
caravans, she has simply proved her greater 
fitness for managing the traffic of the planet. 
And, in the name of the planet's interests, 
which include her own, she claims that task 
as hers. That is all. 

"If there be any irony in this, it is superior, 
cosmic, but it will not rouse laughter at Eng- 
land's expense, or at least not for long. The 
question thus put allows of only one reply on 
the part of the rivals of this champion so 
certain of her strength : to do better. In 
every human being, the right to rule is 
measured by his capacity for ruling. 



xlii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

" Let us add that a poet has arrived to 
add an aesthetical to the ethical imperative 
spontaneously begotten of the needs of the 
hour. After the sanction of good comes that 
of beauty. Your activity is just, says con- 
science ; it is fine, replies Kipling. A great 
gratitude rose up in return towards the in- 
spired one who thus crowned the ancient 
and patient effort of those men and of their 
fathers before them, fulfilling the most elating 
functions, perhaps, that ever devolved upon 
the lyre. And Lord Curzon, in the course 
of an official speech, pays Kipling the com- 
pliment of a quotation, a witness to a like 
orientation and a common passion in the poet 
and the statesman. How powerful a social 
organism is a nation in which forces in other 
respects the most at variance display this 
homogeneity, in which the elect really guide 
the crowd instead of running too far ahead, 
in which men waste so small a part of the 
national intelligence and will ! " 

Other arguments would contribute towards 
showing in imperialism a play of fatal forces, 
inevitable in any living organism to which 
expansion is a law of its duration. And, 



INTRODUCTION xliii 

mark this, it is not with expansion that we 
have to do as much as with co-ordination. 
Imperialism has for its first wish the close 
union of the colonies and the mother-country. 
It is not vexed with needs of immediate an- 
nexation, it only takes care, logically enough, 
that the spheres of its probable extension 
shall remain free. It obeys resistless vital 
laws, against which our prejudices of indi- 
vidual morality struggle with the most 
touching, foolish and vain obstinacy. 

From a loftier point of view, we ought to 
pay England, philosophically, the homage 
due to every powerful desire for unification 
and simplification, to every tendency to pass 
from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous. 
Hatred and war reigned, in days of old, be- 
tween city and city ; later, between kingdom 
and kingdom ; to-day, they would set coali- 
tions face to face ; to-morrow, continents. 
War, I mean the bloody struggle, becomes 
more difficult in proportion to the masses 
which it would have to put in motion. The 
formation of these masses, the agglomeration 
of the nationalities, whatever the necessity 
that prompts or the sentiments that inspire 
them, seem to presage the desirable era when 



xliv THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

slaughter complicated with geometry will no 
longer be the really heroic form of the eternal 
battle. 

lO 

I leave to an Englishman animated with 
sentiments and wishes parallel with those 
which have inspired these pages the care of 
pleading with his fellow-countrymen on be- 
half of the French faults that shock them the 
most. These are principally a cynicism of 
ideas, a cynicism of morals, an anarchical and 
railing love of negative criticism. But I 
believe, in good faith, that they have less far 
to go to meet us than we to meet them. I 
have a score of times verified among the pick 
of intellectual and artistic England the attrac- 
tion exercised by French culture. George 
Meredith, who holds in English literature the 
position of discreet eminence formerly occu- 
pied among ourselves by Mallarm6 ; J. M. 
Barrie, a devotee of Balzac ; the great 
Swinburne, who writes admirably in French 
(and even in archaic French) and who has 
devoted the most enthusiastic of books to 
Victor Hugo ; John Bodley and Edmund 
Gosse, tried friends both ; Henry James, an 



INTRODUCTION xlv 

Englishman by adoption, to whom our lan- 
guage and our literature are as familiar as to 
many of our academicians : these and many 
others all love our country ! And I would 
go so far as to say that the sympathy which 
they show is inseparable from the intellectual 
and artistic development in England and that 
it almost always accompanies an individual 
superiority of this kind. 

As for the people, it is ignorant, but cordial. 
I have verified this too. To the mind of the 
people, the great misfortune of not being born 
an Englishman gives any inoffensive stranger 
a claim upon its sympathy. We have the 
first claim. On the other hand, it hates the 
Germans, even more than it hates the 
Russians : it will never make friends with 
any nation, not excepting America, more 
willingly than with ours. 

The practical aspect of the question is the 
necessary and increased diffusion of the 
English and French languages in the two 
countries. Both show a certain want of 
capacity for this study. This originates only 
from the absence, hitherto, of any pressing 
need. The two idioms, indeed, are the 
most widespread languages on the planet : 



xlvi THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

a striking fact, rich in consequences, heavy 
with arguments. A man who possesses both 
holds the keys of Latin civiHzation and 
Teutonic civilization, that is to say of the 
greatest treasure-house of human knowledge. 
This fruitful necessity is bound to spring 
from the reconciliation of the two peoples. 
The verb s entendre expresses it eloquently. 
Space fails me to unfold here a practical 
plan (in the English fashion) for a rational 
teaching of the two languages. The sug- 
gestions that present themselves to the mind 
in this matter are many. They will form the 
subject of a separate study. It is enough to 
say, for the moment, that the manner in 
which this teaching has, until very recently, 
been conceived and practised in France de- 
serves no other epithet than that of ridiculous. 
In England, the inadequacy of French teach- 
ing was set off by a result which was rough 
in itself, but at least useful as a means of 
primitive communication. Mr. H. G. Wells, 
in his Mankind in the Making, says that 
he is sure "that it would be a very painful 
and shocking thought indeed to an English 
parent to think that French was taught in 
school with a view to reading French books" 



INTRODUCTION xlvii 

(I need not explain what the term French 
books suggests at the first blush to an average 
imagination in puritan England). A plan of 
common action in both countries (allowing, 
of course, for all the shades and differences 
demanded by the difference of temperament) 
would first have to be worked out with this 
object. Next, it would have to be applied 
by every available means : the press, publicity, 
parliamentary action, appeals to capital. We 
ask for only an infinitesimal part of all the 
gold that flows towards the works of a charity 
blind enough to sacrifice the interests of the 
race to that of its most feeble, that is to say 
of its most dangerous individuals ! There 
would necessarily be connected with the 
scheme a system of journeys, of mutual 
visits, the organization of which would com- 
bine a number of valuable collaborations and 
ingenious initiatives. Everything is to be 
done in this domain. The honour and the 
profit will reward the pioneers no less than the 
settlers of the conquered territory. We offer 
not only an apostleship, but a "business:" 
none but the clumsiest folly could refuse to 
see it, none but the most inveterate hypocrisy 
to proclaim it. Modern ethics have once 



xlviii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

again boldly identified man's interest with 
his duty. They should never have been 
separated. 



II 



The reader would do wrong, judging by 
the foregoing, to expect to find in this book 
a stubborn panegyric of England, charac- 
terized by a methodical partiality, dictated by 
a definite intention, tending towards a clearly- 
proposed object. If this were its nature, the 
study would lose all critical value and the 
author is anxious to state that the following 
notes, taken at times anterior to the writing 
of these present lines, constitute straggling, 
unconsidered documents from which he has 
formed the presumptions which he ventures 
to set forth here. These documents have 
not followed on the thesis, but have come 
before them. The reader has but to look 
through them to convince himself of this. 

I know not what the future of Franco- 
English friendship will be. Our noblest hopes 
encroach imprudently on the ironical future, 
even as our most ambitious formulas are 
riddled buckets which we lower in vain into 
the well of truth. We know all this. But, 



INTRODUCTION xlix 

having not elected to die, we decide to live 
and as entirely as we can. The false scorn 
of self-complacent reason does wrong to 
smile at seeing the English unhesitatingly 
take up the nearest work to hand, without 
providing for the morrow and its perhaps 
contradictory needs. This is a grave error 
of our intelligence, tainted of itself and 
limited by itself. That instinct for labour 
is, on the contrary, the first of all forces. 
It errs, it will err, so long as the laws remain 
unknown. But those laws are becoming 
better known daily and the habit of work is 
the one thing which it is important never 
to lose. 

Whatever the future may be, it cannot be 
a useless task to have tried to set up on the 
horizon of time a true image of a successful 
people. No form of activity, when one 
knows how to look at it, in the corruption 
of its end or the rawness of its birth, escapes 
insatiable beauty. But I do not know that, 
notwithstanding the decree of the purists, 
the promises of happiness contained in an 
ideal of aesthetic harmony need necessarily 
degrade it. 

Of all unions of nations outlined at the 

d 



1 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

present time none is more capable of main- 
taining life or more worthy of being served 
in the presumable interest of mankind. 
This alliance has militating in its favour not 
temporary or superficial reasons, but instinct, 
the need to behold the realization of that 
higher harmony of faculties and forces which 
the fusion of national temperaments so com- 
plementary as these would imply. This 
desire (which, in a manner, is as disinterested 
as the wish of a well-disposed Martian 
mindful of the rhythm of our terrestrial 
civilizations) is none the less patriotic for 
that. It is a rare piece of good fortune to 
find two imperatives, that of the general and 
that of the national good, too often hostile, 
now reconciled in one fair hope. 

Let us take the question in its least par- 
ticular form. It may be said that the funda- 
mental difference, the respective superiority 
no less than the weakness of the two peoples, 
is that one sees the universe under an in- 
tellectual aspect, the other under a moral 
aspect. The Englishman refuses to separate 
the moral end from the idea ; where we are 
concerned, morality must adapt itself to the 
idea : that is morality's affair. The Frenchman 



INTRODUCTION li 

is a theatre of ideas : they are so many masks 
whose dance affords him the most dehcate 
pleasures ; but let one of them arise in the 
nudity of the brain of a Saxon or Slav : forth- 
with imperious, eloquent, behold it ready 
to enthral him. The result of our love of 
the psychical ballet is a more brilliant 
civilization, animated, ventilated with per- 
petual discussions, sifting every conception 
and every principle, a civilization doubtless 
indispensable to the intellectual movement 
of the world, but dangerous to itself through 
lack of homogeneity (for elasticity does not 
always supply the place of resistance), dan- 
gerous through the rashness of the experi- 
ments which it proposes and which it risks 
in the exhausting crises of its revolutions. 

No doubt it is a good thing that truth 
should constantly be called into question. 
But we do not prove our grasp of the law 
of continuity by violently and continually 
shaking the belief of yesterday to its most 
sacred foundations before preparing a shelter, 
were it but a wretched makeshift, for the 
sorrowful herd of which it was the only 
lodging. Truth, like the human being, must 
eliminate its decaying elements without con- 



lii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

vulsions, by the very law of its growth. To 
attack it at its foundations is to threaten its 
very promises. One does not graft the tree 
upon the root. Spiritual voluptuousness, 
which is our capital sin and which intelligence 
finds gnawing at its base, in a manner reduces 
the exquisite art and the supreme irony of 
our intellectual nihilists to the level of the 
stupidity of the Catoblepas, which, when 
grazing, unconsciously devours its own 
feet. How different it is with the English- 
man, with his simple equipment of prin- 
ciples, at once stops and props, beyond 
which he considers it indecent to let his 
reflections run ! The speculative boldness 
of the German alarms him ; the Russian, 
with his habit of pushing an idea to its 
ultimate catastrophe, offends his common 
sense ; French scepticism inspires him with 
a curiosity which is a little anxious, some- 
times charmed and sometimes contemptuous, 
according to his degree of culture and 
comprehension, although, at bottom, the 
most Athenian of our smiles must produce 
upon him the effect of the grimace of a 
monkey putting out its tongue at itself in the 
glass. 



INTRODUCTION liii 

Now in both countries there is a chosen 
class that perceives the defects peculiar to its 
culture. This is a considerable phenomenon, 
upon which we must insist, for it is new in 
the history of general civilization. No people 
before modern times possessed the necessary 
amount of personal and comparative docu- 
ments to form as it were an impartial idea 
of its own tendencies and capacities. It has 
been said that races possessed no justice 
except within doors : the same might have 
been said of their intelligence. 

These tendencies (supposing the impossible 
case that they should be exercised under seal, 
so to speak) would end by making of London 
a Babylon of coal and gold, some warehouse 
of the world, a soulless metropolis of in- 
numerable counting-houses, and of Paris the 
Rome of a sort of intellectual and icono- 
clastic papacy, without temporal dominion, 
ere long delivered to the contempt which 
the sophists and Graeculi have always de- 
served. Still, these previsions are but a 
jest and I will at once ask the reader to 
excuse me, here and later, if I endeavour 
sometimes to fix his attention by means of 
lively images. 



liv THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

I know no intelligent Frenchman that has 
reflected or travelled, be it ever so little, and 
is not ready to admit our national faults, too 
often, indeed, with a wealth of disparagement 
which is calculated to scandalize the foreigner 
who listens to it. On the other hand, the 
book from which I have quoted above, 
Mankind in the Making, points with great 
precision to the movement of modern ideas 
that directs the evolution of English culture. 
The cry of the English writer is, " Give 
books ! " He is constantly returning to it, 
as representing the most urgent need of the 
hour. Whereas, with us, our critics warn 
us against the opposite danger : we have too 
long kept up the barren cult of bookish 
learning ; what we need is the direct lessons 
of observation, facts and life. ... 

In that brain of the cosmos which is the 
human race (I know all the criticisms and 
reproaches of anthropomorphism which people 
address to this sort of analogy : nevertheless^ 
we must return to it, once that we have the 
notion of that continuity of phenomena of 
which M. Dastre says so justly, in his fine 
work, La Science et la vie, that it is "a form 
of mentality "), the differentiation always at 



INTRODUCTION Iv 

work has created cells which, served by the 
senses, weave upon the loom of the nervous 
fibres images of the outer world, images of 
every kind, artless, ingenious or beautiful. 
Such is their charm that their artificers 
become enraptured with them, sometimes, 
one would think, to the point of forgetting 
that the need which prompts their task is, 
before all, perpetually to conclude, from the 
shadows cast by outside things upon the 
woof of the soul, which movements, which 
acts are best adapted to the preservation of 
the total organism. In other cells, on the 
contrary, the faculties for co-ordinating ex- 
ternal teachings attain a fuller development. 
It seems that the division of labour, the 
fundamental law of evolution, presides over 
the play of these activities, which seem to 
separate only soon to unite more closely 
than before in the harmony of a higher 
life. 

The conclusion of this apologue will not 
have escaped the reader. Nothing is more 
logical or more desirable than to associate 
two human groups, of which one, France, 
has the gift of supplying the brightest repre- 
sentations of the planetary conscience, while 



Ivi THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the other, Great Britain, possesses the tried 
wisdom and power of co-ordinating the 
lessons of those images conformably with the 
greatest usefulness. 

This wish will, no doubt, appear Utopian : 
to tell the truth, what I have here sketched 
is, above all, an ideal alliance. It will be 
formed some day, across other frontiers, 
what matter ! The disillusions of the 
present count only in existences limited by 
the cradle and the tomb. Besides, it is 
well to open up large perspectives : they 
lend dignity to the foreground. Moreover, 
the star-gazer who falls into his well cuts, 
in the main, a less comical figure than 
those apostles of common sense who from 
the Promised Land of the possible carve 
out little provinces according to the 
measure of their intelligence and their 
generosity. 

I do not think, for the rest, that we should 
look very far into the future for a motive and 
a reward for this hoped-for union. England 
has the habit and the love of duty : she 
keeps the mental mould into which we are 
eager to pour the glowing metal that 
bubbles in the crucible of our thought. We 



INTRODUCTION Ivii 

can cast in it the statue of a beautiful 
morrow. 

What that future duty (without which we 
die) will be science will teach us. We can 
look only to science for that revelation. 
Science, in less than a century, has re-created 
the universe around us. We hardly notice 
it, we who have so long been kept asleep by 
the old dreams. The religions and moralities 
of the past, encampments of an hour's dura- 
tion, were built up on the old formidable and 
ill-apprehended instincts. Here verily is the 
twilight of the Gods and the deliverance of 
Prometheus. The great myths clasp and 
respond to one another. Zeus, Odin, 
Yahveh trampling nations under foot have 
crumbled into the abyss. But it is not 
the voice of useless and cowardly renuncia- 
tion that hovers over their ruin ; the Nixies 
have not for ever carried away the prophetic 
gold from the depths of the Rhine. The 
liberated Titan whose name is Work, Effort, 
Hope lifts the gold made young again 
towards the sun. Black, fierce, bloody, 
hideous as thou art, hail, son of Chaos and 
Sorrow, father of Mankind ! The opening 
era will take up thy idyll by the voice of all 



Iviii THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

its geniuses, at that turn in the human road 
where the genius of the age that is ending, 
a victim of the ancient witchcrafts, refused to 
hear, instead of the bells of Montsalvat, the 
sublime sound of thy broken chains ! 

The tables of a new Law are in liberating 
hands : characters as yet mysterious, for ever 
mysterious, which the two elders of the 
world's civilization are about to spell out 
with foreheads brought close together and 
with joined hands. 

But let us leave this region of symbols, 
distrusted by the crowd. 

And, to take leave of metaphorical 
language, let us say that the new concep- 
tion of good and evil which science is 
elaborating will create a new duty. We 
shall doubtless be the first to perceive it, 
but England would teach us the prudence 
and the practical wisdom that should preside 
over the passage from the morality of 
yesterday towards that of to-day. She is 
already taking preliminary action. The 
bishops no longer fulminate against the 
scholars. With her aid, we shall perhaps 
form a first necessary notion of respect. But 
into this respect we shall have flung the 



INTRODUCTION lix 

purest portion of the spoil of intelligence : 
it shall be no longer dupery or pharisaism. 
It shall acquiesce with smiling piety no 
longer in the lie of the immutable essence, 
but in the truth of the eternal Becoming, 
in truth ever provisional, rejuvenated, per- 
petually breaking loose from itself, like virtue 
and like beauty. 

12 

I trust that many clear-sighted and well- 
intentioned minds will make good what is 
lacking in the foregoing statement and be 
able to discern in it some reasons to believe 
in the national as well as human interest 
which the two peoples would have in uniting. 
It is time, in the history of the globe, that 
two nations should set the example, so rich 
in noble promises, of this understanding, 
whether it be limited to a more intimate 
reciprocal acquaintance with each other's 
institutions and souls or end in the narrow 
communion of our effort and our social life 
by throwing into common stock our re- 
spective contributions to culture and the 
world's progress. Those minds and ener- 



Ix THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

gies whom the destinies of the world adjure 
will next have it as their task to work for 
that future. It is a duty to prepare it ; it is 
already an honour (of which we modestly 
claim our share) to have felt it coming. 



R. d'H. 



Port Mejean, Cap Brun, 
May 1904. 



PART THE FIRST 
IN ENGLAND 



CHAPTER I 
ARRIVAL— FOG— ECHOES OF WAR 



The train bears us towards London, through the fat 
fields of Sussex, and I feel the strange soul that 
exhales from these grassy meadows where herds 
of cattle graze, from these gently undulating hills 
where stately trees stand grouped in clusters, 
from these bright brick cottages set between a 
garden and a tennis-court. The simplicity, the 
ease of this serene country-side are found again in 
the conceptions, the actions and doings of these 
men. Theirs are souls in which certainty has built 
its nest ; this landscape explains and annotates them. 
They are provided with three or four solutions, 
implying the same number of principles; they 
manage to live on that; and they take only in 
moderation the wine of general ideas with which 
Germany intoxicates herself. They are a race of 
men of action whom analysis does not amuse. And 
then one says to one's self that they have had 
Shakspeare, poets of the imagination like Shelley, 
of desire like Swinburne, painters like Turner, 



4 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

artists and men of adventure as bold as those 
whom any race has flung into the human ideal and 
one feels, beyond the undefinable attraction of men 
and things, a need to understand, to bring one's own 
contribution, however humble it be, towards the 
mutual apprehension of soul and motive which the 
absurd races of mankind are so slow to realize. 



It was not a true fog, notwithstanding the lighted 
street-lamps, the slackened pace of the carriages, 
the complete darkness at eleven o'clock in the 
morning. 

" The real fog, sir, is when the water-fog comes 
up from the Thames and mixes with the smoke of 
the city," says a native. 

Then, traffic becomes impossible ; you cannot see 
eighteen inches before your face ; you must give up 
the idea of going out, of keeping your dinner-engage- 
ment : everything is suspended. 

I have not seen this plague of darkness, but, all 
the same, the fog on this morning of my arrival 
strikes me as fairly successful. Through the glass 
of my sash-window, I see the daylight of an 
aquarium, a sooty glimmer that varies in shade from 
pearl-grey to dull yellow, flickers heavily and re- 
luctantly filters the decomposed rays of a distant 
and lost luminary, more lost than the sun of those 
arctic nights which are but one long night. Outside, 



FOG 5 

the lighted gas-jets, the lamps of passing carriages 
shine red in haloes that seem to mufQe the light 
even as the mist muffles the sound. A fantastic 
atmosphere, inhabited by a people of inordinate or 
laughable shapes, in which the three dimensions 
seem to indulge in a sly quarrel. Wills-o'-the-wisp 
pass and men in frock-coats, messenger-boys and 
flower-girls whose shabby feathered hats flee through 
the mystery of the haze like poor, drunk birds. A 
luminous clock-face bores a hole in space and hangs 
like a moon, for the tower that carries it is in- 
visible ; and a bell vaguely rings out the time that 
it must be on this unknown world. You receive an 
impression as of another planet and forget that the 
clock which you hear up there is Big Ben, that 
those trails of mist are fastening on the old Norman 
roof of the venerable Abbey, that Westminster 
Bridge — and not some causeway filled with meteors 
and ghosts disguised as clerks and policemen — 
plunges there, before your eyes, riding the abyss 
whence new layers of vapour rise perpetually, in 
soft and lazy scrolls, over the granite parapets, the 
trees of the squares, the roofs of the houses, the 
illuminated sky-signs, the steeples and domes, the 
stars and the skies. 

And the strangest thing, in the depths of that 
town foundered as after some mighty shipwreck in 
the seas of the sun, is that you discover a strange 
voluptuousness in this transfigured scene, in the 
novelty of this irrecognizable and illusive world. The 
particular odour of the fog, an alkaline odour, with a 



6 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

base of creosote, ends by pleasing ; an enveloping, 
mellow charm persuades you ; from the heart of the 
phosphorus and honey-coloured mists issues a pene- 
trating and heavy languor. How intense must be 
the sage's meditations, how close the lover's embrace, 
in those rooms, near the fires on which "the red- 
armed servant-maid " of whom Mallarm^ speaks 
heaps her noisy coal ! In what a fine gravity must 
thought and kisses be decked here, far from the 
shameless daylight, under the streaming veils of the 
widow city. And yet, when all is said, it is onl3ron 
such days as this that one really understands the 
almost celestial charm which imaginations fed on 
these fogs have always discovered in the land of the 
sun, Italy, the Italy of Shakspeare and Turner, the 
land where Keats and Browning lie buried, the 
happy country of every noble exile. Certainly, these 
must have known an Italy fairer than our dreams, a 
Promised Land of beauty all the more desired, all 
the more adorned with fascinations in that it was 
coveted longer and from a remoter distance. 



3 

My railway-carriage is suddenly invaded, at the 
station that serves Shorncliffie Camp, by five gentle- 
men in khaki on their way to London. They are 
lively, very lively, but deferential nevertheless. If 
they have sat down on my hat, they are sorry ; and 
my offer of cigarettes touches them. They apologize 



ECHOES OF WAR 7 

for breaking in upon me and, for five minutes, I 
watch the most ineffectual efforts to lop their ordi- 
nary speech, in my honour, of its soldierly flowers. 
Nothing could be more touching or more useless : the 
dashes and asterisks shoot forth, as though by 
magic, at the four corners of the conversation ; they 
give up the attempt on perceiving that their travel- 
ling-companion thinks them much more amusing as 
they are ; and all ends in the proposal of a toothful 
of whisky from a flask taken from a great-coat 
pocket and handed round. 

Henceforth, we are good friends : I ask them 
where they come from, the names of their regiments. 
The oldest is, perhaps, thirty-five ; the youngest, 
whom they call " Kid," is barely eighteen. They 
are African and Canadian colonials ; they wear the 
felt hat, turned up on one side, which has become a 
familiar object in the streets and refreshment-bars of 
London. They have been sent to England on sick- 
leave and are now going back to their own country 
or returning to the Transvaal. They talk without 
restraint and it is all singularly instructive. Names 
of generals are mentioned in the conversation ; 
appreciations, judgments, comparisons are made. 
What a gulf between the psychology of these men 
and that of a French soldier ! Those commanders 
of whom they speak, generals no longer able to 
count their reverses or the human lives uselessly 
sacrificed to obtain new reverses, those army-leaders 
who, in the opinion of my own country, would be 
for all time discredited, despised, ruined, done for. 



8 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

are named by their soldiers in tones of respect, 
admiration and confidence ! It is not put on, they do 
not take me for a foreigner, they talk with the same 
freedom as if I were not there : 

" Duller, there's a man for you ! " 

" Cheers for old Duller ! " 

I see once more the heavy, square-jawed face 
which figures in every shop-window, on every wall, 
on every box of wooden matches, to remind the 
English of the shambles of Colenso. 

" And Gatacre ! What do you say to Gatacre ? 

I venture to insinuate : 

" I thought that the men didn't like him, that he 
wore them out. Surely they used to call him Guts- 
acher ? " 

" Him ? Why, all his men cried when he left. He 
used to tire you, if you like, but at least he fed 
you." 

They are proud of that one too, as of the others. 
They are proud of him on principle, because you 
must be proud of something when you're an English- 
man ; they are proud, first, because they do not 
understand and, next, because they understand that 
they must not understand. A profound instinct 
warns them against intelligence, the enemy of action. 
They have a dim presentiment of the dangers of 
analysis. If it is bad to be led by incapable com- 
manders, it is worse to know it, for that makes them 
no better and they are obeyed with less self-denial. 
They could, no doubt, be changed ;, but common- 
sense suggests that the new ones would not differ 



ECHOES OF WAR 9 

perceptibly from the old. This is how the men 
argue, these men in whom the hierarchical sentiment, 
social as well as military (M. Chevrillon, in his excel- 
lent articles in the Revue de Paris, gave, among 
other reasons for General Buller's popularity, his 
quality as a country squire), does not exclude the 
sense of solidarity. This state of mind among the 
combatants appears enviable beside that which would 
undoubtedly prevail among French soldiers in similar 
circumstances : every order discussed, suspected, 
jeered at ; the personality of each superior officer 
pitilessly judged ; every strategical movement sub- 
mitted to the criticisms of camp-fire Jominis ; and all 
under the irritating suppression of an ill-conceived 
system of discipline, which has slain initiative, but 
begotten jealousy and discontent. The histrionic 
qualities essential in a leader of men are infinitely 
more necessary for a commander of Latins, who is 
bound to keep up a chronic state of enthusiasm, lest 
he be accused of incompetency first and treachery 
after ! But then, what ought not to have been 
effected with such fighting - machines as these 
English soldiers, whom discipline, devoid of any 
galling strictness, has not robbed of a sense of their 
individual value and who are, nevertheless, so easy 
to lead, with their confidence so quickly given, their 
energy which is not impaired by too much educa- 
tion or intelligence, their extraordinary spirit of 
patriotism ! 



lo THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



4 

Another bell, a new scene. We are at Bourne- 
mouth, the pleasant resort on the Hampshire coast 
which shares with Torquay the sovereignty of that 
pale and charming English Riviera. The cliffs are 
crowned with pine-forests, the weather is mild, old 
ladies are being taken out in little carriages. The 
smart hotel of the place pushes the red railings of 
its garden of laurels and box-trees almost to the 
edge of the cliff. The inside is all covered with 
frescoes, real frescoes, painted by hand, with a 
romantico - Louis - Philippo - Pompeiano - chromolitho- 
graphico-middle-class comicality which produces the 
most magnificonsequential effects. These old, more 
or less neglected watering-places, some of which 
were at the height of their splendour in the days 
of the Georges, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, where 
Brummell flourished, often display those archi- 
tectural phenomena of which the minds of the 
decorators of the Victorian era were delivered after 
their courageous, but rejected attempts at flirtation 
with fancy. 

To-night, seated round a comfortable fire that, by 
way of paradox, warms a room in the Moorish style 
in which Boabdil would have suffered, we are once 
more talking war with two friends, one of whom, a 
lieutenant in the militia, has just returned from 
Africa after thirteen months' campaigning. He has 
a sense of the picturesque, of emotion ; he has 



ECHOES OF WAR n 

" seen " things. This is very rare in a soldier, 
especially an English soldier. In India, among 
many officers of the late Queen, I met only one, a 
captain of Goorkhas, who possessed that gift of live 
and tragic detail. I shall never forget a certain 
story of an Afghan transfixed by a British lancer 
and running up the lance stuck through his body so 
as to be able to slash at the trooper's fingers with 
his knife. 

My friend's tales were no less exciting. We saw 
war pass before our eyes, hideous modern war, 
without dash or intoxication, which is as discon- 
certing to the neophyte as M. Deibler's prosaic 
guillotine must be to the prentice journalist who 
dreams of scaffolds and gallows. The long marches, 
the torturing thirst, the consideration shown by the 
soldiers at the halting-place to the good-natured 
officer, visions of young corpses leaning against an 
ant-hill, holding a photograph in their hands, or of 
a soldier, with his stomach torn away by a shell, 
bursting with laughter at the ridiculous spectacle of 
his scooped-out body : all this procession of horrors 
and iniquities went by at the call of the speaker's 
memory or his hearers' eager questions ; for nothing 
is more fascinating than stories of death. 

The witness talks without vehemence, judges his 
enemies coolly and in all good faith : of that there 
is no doubt. Very interesting is his appreciation of 
the Boer character : 

" A consummate selfishness ; shows no interest 
in the collective mass nor any patriotism, in the 



12 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

ordinary sense of the word; cares only for his 
house, his wife, his cattle and his skin. His care 
for the last takes the form of excessive caution. 
Hates danger ; has no spirit of chivalry : on the 
contrary, is inclined to laugh at it in his foreign 
partisans and his enemies — when they give him the 
chance. Ladysmith and Mafeking owed their safety 
only to the Boers' dislike to exposing themselves in 
the open, to sacrificing a few lives for an assured 
success. Nothing would have been easier than to 
capture those almost unfortified towns. And, in 
the early battles of the war, the least spirit of initia- 
tive might have changed the British defeats into 
irretrievable disasters." 

Our military attache with the Boer forces came 
back, I have since been told, holding the same views ; 
there is, therefore, no reason to doubt their accuracy. 
And one remains more and more thoughtful before 
that campaign in which so many things— numbers, 
gold, the inferiority of the adversary — seemed to 
facilitate England's triumph, that campaign whose 
leaders, laden with ovations, grants and honours, 
enjoy the fruits of their reverses with calm, but 
dignified modesty, amid the homage of their fellow- 
citizens and the enthusiasm of their victims I 



CHAPTER II 
CORONATION TIME 



Not a soul, this morning, in the undulating fields 
or in the brick cottages : the cows are left to look 
after themselves [in the emerald meadows where 
Constable painted them ; the huge town, like a heart 
filled with gladness, has absorbed all the people of 
England. 

The appearance of London is changed : the 
streets are lined with improvised covered galleries, 
the houses masked with stands and with the cruel 
red cloth. It is undeniably ugly, but so dignified ! 
What, after all, is imagination ? A frivolous thing, 
an absence of conviction, the luxury of sceptics. 
The uniform plan of these festoons of flowers and 
vegetable matter, the poverty of invention that 
arranges these lamps so as to form two inevitable 
initials : such things as these mark the triumph of 
the strenuous barbarism of the races to whom the 
future belongs. 



14 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



One would never know this for a London Sunday. 
A compact crowd floods the squares, the streets, the 
bridges, a crowd which the showers drive to take 
shelter under the half-finished timber-work, from 
whose scarlet calico pink rivulets trickle down upon 
umbrellas that refuse to be discouraged. It is a 
serious crowd, controlled by the persuasive police, 
and it collects on the pavements loafers of every 
quality, their noses upturned towards the bedizened 
house-fronts : bank clerks in dominical frock-coats ; 
workmen looking like gentlemen with us, only more 
so, save for their hands, which are too red, and the 
mangled finger-nails with which they press down 
the bowls of their short pipes ; costermongers in 
brown jackets with mother-o'-pearl buttons, who 
have come from incredible suburbs accompanied by 
Perditas marvellously attired in those extraordinary 
feathered hats which almost correspond with the 
cap of our late grisettes and invariably crown the 
head of Cockney beauty. 



3 

A flock of carriages follows closely, one upon the 
other, like sheep, around the refuges, divides at 
the barriers, under the unfinished triumphal arches. 
Here are aristocratic landaus, enormous sea-shells 



CORONATION TIME 15 

swung on the springs which we are beginning to 
discard in favour of pneumatic tyres, and ladies, 
from the height of their cushions swinging like 
hammocks, look down with a kindly air upon the 
good-humoured populace, which, in this logical 
country, sees them pass as a natural manifestation 
of the national tradition, strength and luxury and 
shows no jealousy, but rather pride and gratitude, 
as at the sight of the shade and beauty of a fine tree 
in a park. Down to the brawling crew of that cart 
in which a great jug of beer passes round from mouth 
to mouth, all show a certain deference to the aristo- 
cratic turn-out. And, in general, the whole pro- 
cession makes its way soberly ; noisy passages are 
the exception; and the crowd does not echo the 
shouts that frighten the lean nag from Bayswater or 
Upper Tooting, which, with a mixture of shyness 
and snobbery, ventures to intrude its plebeian hoof 
between the house-fronts of Pall Mall. 

The omnibuses have doubled and trebled their 
fares. Their tops are full. Enormous brakes drive 
about crammed with Hindu soldiers. They make a 
display of white teeth and regular features. One 
easily knows them for Sikhs by their faces and 
turbans. I may have seen them swim, wearing an 
iron bracelet, their long hair dragging upon the 
torpid water, in the sacred tank of Amritsar, near 
Lahore, where, on a marble island platform, a gilded 
temple guards the book of their faith. . . . 



1 6 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



4 
What shall I say of the decoration of the streets ? 
It is not, perhaps, thus that the contemporaries of 
Pericles would have contrived to adorn the road to 
the Panathenaea ; but, nevertheless, one cannot deny 
certain happy inspirations, if it were only, before 
all, that of setting up gigantic stands in front of all 
the public buildings in London, including West- 
minster Abbey, which is almost entirely hidden 
behind a colossal stand of peculiarly aggressive size 
and hideousness, which, however, cannot fail to 
bring in an excellent profit to its builder! The 
National Gallery bashfully raises the sinister 
pepper-box that serves as its dome behind a 
Leviathan scaffolding. Alone, in the middle of 
Trafalgar Square, Nelson's column rises unadorned. 
At its feet, street-urchins sail their paper boats on 
the water of the stone fountains, as in the picture of 
Dido building Carthage : a pretty symbol, by which 
we can allow ourselves to be moved, after Ruskin. 
Let us hope that the noble pillar, guarded by its 
watchful lions, will not be rolled up in some unto- 
ward ornament : the last ode of the Poet Laureate, 
a humorist suggests ! . . . 

5 

The artistic elect of London are generally pleased 
with the Canadian triumphal arch that stands before 



CORONATION TIME 17 

the palace of Whitehall, almost on the spot where 
Charles I. was beheaded : other times, other 
manners. This monument, the inscription on 
which runs, " Canada, Britain's granary," seems 
determined, fiercely determined to justify the meta- 
phor. We here see wheat-sheaves, bristling spikes 
of corn, among red draperies with yellow fringes ; 
grain under glass framed with artificial roses ; heads 
of domestic animals ; harrows, ploughshares and 
even coloured photographs. The more numerous 
the ingredients, the more successful the result: 
plum-pudding aesthetics, in short. 



6 

The whole of St. James's Street is one great 
bower of green garlands and triumphal lettuces, 
from which hang stuffed doves, an engaging 
and peaceful emblem. And then there are paper 
lanterns and celluloid lanterns, transparencies and 
streamers and Venetian masts and awnings, flags 
and pennants, red canopies with yellow rosettes 
and yellow canopies with green rosettes, tricolor 
balconies, lions rampant, harps, thistles and feathers, 
Corinthian capitals whose unkempt acanthus-leaves 
spread with a bewildered air at the top of their 
shafts swathed in scarlet cotton, lacquered, stucco 
and painted inscriptions screaming with loyalty, 
zinc flowers, glass jars, plaster busts, gilt cardboard 
elephant-heads : all these things will see the passing 



18 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of Edward the Well-beloved when he goes to be 
crowned. 



7 

The smart thing, during these last nights in 
London, has been to go to see the illuminations on 
the top of an omnibus hired for the occasion, or else 
on a coach with only two horses : even that was 
dangerous in this packed crowd. O good, peaceful 
English crowd, restrained and swayed by the Bobby, 
the chaste, frugal, gentle Bobby under the black 
dome of his helmet ! 

From the top of the coach, which is stopped by the 
block in Piccadilly, where the carriages form stationary 
islands in the stream of humanity (the rate of pro- 
gress is ten yards in half an hour), we bow and call 
out to our friends on the pavements, in the balconies 
or on the different conveyances : the men in dress- 
clothes, the ladies in dinner-dress under their wraps. 
An admiral is driving : as a young midshipman, he 
never went to sea without his tandem harness. We 
pass under the windows of the old Baroness, whose 
house, draped from top to bottom in cretonne imita- 
ting Flemish tapestry, receives a popular ovation : 
she bows her thanks from the balcony. She looks 
like a little old portrait of 1855, but her young 
husband appears infinitely more modern. 

The illuminations, like the decorations and the pro- 
cessions, are anywise, without the smallest sense of 
harmonious effect. And yet there was room for ideas 



CORONATION TIME 19 

in this branch of decorative art 1 Why did they not 
revive the allegories of olden time, so charming in 
their pedantic grace ? Good Queen Bess was escorted 
to her coronation by Time and Truth, without 
counting the giants Gog and Magog, the traditional 
guardians of the City. When she reached the church, 
she still held in her hand a sprig of rosemary which 
an old woman had given her as she crossed the 
Thames, The incident has its charm, when one 
thinks of the terrible red woman, seated on her hack, 
with strings of pearls in her sandy hair, of the fierce 
flirt, who used an axe-head for a mirror and in whose 
cupboards, at her death, were found — O prodigious 
frippery of an ill-loved old fairy ! — twelve hundred 
gowns of brocade and cloth of gold. 



Alexandra Palace is a sort of Crystal Palace, a 
fair in a great hot-house. A camp of tents in the 
surrounding gardens shelters the most incongruous 
collection of heroes imaginable. 

The New-Zealanders, magnificent specimens of 
vigorous, solid, serious animals, realize curiously a 
type of southern Scot, bigger, heavier, but with the 
same characteristics of at times fanatical gravity and 
at times ponderous intentness. They smack with 
their riding-whips the leather leggings that mark the 
shape of their sturdy limbs ; one of them confesses 
to me, with puritanical sincerity, that two things in 



20 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

London disgust him: the women and the public- 
houses. 

Meanwhile, gallant Canadians are pouring out tea, 
under the trees, for their young kinswomen. I wonder 
if my friend Thibault, surname Leveille (an amusing 
name for an English soldier !), who, at the time of 
the Diamond Jubilee, told me the latest gossip of 
Montreal in a French full of turns of the days of 
Jacques Cartier, is back again this year ? Or, do 
those Maoris take his place, or those Fijians with 
their bristling, whitewashed hair, with their bare 
legs under their little white calico kilts ? Which of 
their senses, I wonder, is most excited by the 
appearance of the fresh and succulent young 
Englishwomen, which mucous membrane most lustily 
stirred at the sight of those appetizing flesh-colours ? 
For, down yonder, on the shores of the coral gulfs 
under the scented creepers, they have tasted, on 
festive occasions, the classic fare of their banquets, 
' long pig," which is their name for man. ... 

The Cypriotes, in their becoming tarbooshes, 
parade their oriental self-sufficiency and their aqui- 
line noses with the thin nostrils, 

. . . flairant diamine ou pistil. 

The negroes we no longer count. Most of them 
belong to those tribes of athletic Africans, those same 
marvellous fighting-brutes whom our own officers 
have told me that they have seen spar with one 
another for a pipe of tobacco under the enemy's fire 
at four hundred yards. And, wounded to the death, 



CORONATION TIME 21 

slashed to pieces, on the htter that bore them from 
the field they sang, in a hoarse voice, a savage, im- 
provised hymn to the glory of the officer-boy from 
Saint-Cyr who had led them there to die for an 
impossible country and an unknown Lou bet. . . . 



9 

Never was stage effect led up to with more perfect 
art and care than the news that burst this afternoon 
over thunder-struck London. One has not even the 
courage to reproach fate with her too easy blows : 
the catastrophe descends, totally unforeseen, at the 
culminating moment of the play. 

The scene passes in an immense dining-room, 
hung with admirable Gobelins after Coypel. The 
French windows look out over terraces, pieces of 
water, lawns, a great park of seventy acres in the 
heart of London. There are two tables : at one, the 
mistress of the house has the Grand-duke of Hesse 
on her right, an empty chair on her left ; at the other, 
the host is seated beside the Duchess of Connaught 
and the princesses, her daughters. The conversa- 
tion, made up of commonplaces, lags, weighed down 
by I know not what dull anxiety, which is certainly 
more or less clearly defined according to the degree 
of initiation of each guest. 

Suddenly, a footman bows to whisper to the 
host, who rises, goes out and returns a moment 
after, ushering in the Duke of Connaught, pale, in a 



22 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

general's uniform, bringing the news : the coronation 
is postponed ! 

To his preoccupations as a family-man and a 
model brother is added the care of 59,000 soldiers 
to provide for. No smaller a number has come to 
these rejoicings, which a brutal destiny counter- 
mands. Scraps of conversation are uttered in awe- 
struck accents : 

"Perityphlitis. . . ." 

" No, appendicitis. . . ." 

" There was no question of anything, two months 
ago, at least 1 " 

" Oh, forty-eight hours ago, nobody could have 
said for certain. ..." 

"Nobody. ..." 

"And to think that Granier told me so in Paris ! . . ." 

The same broken phrases (it reminds one of 
passages in Saint-Simon : " Madame arrived scream- 
ing. . . .") are continued in the loveUest gardens in 
the world : Italian flower-beds, Dutch summer- 
houses, Shakspearean groves, statues, fountains and 
hedges wherelurks the unexpected grace of a rockery, 
or a Japanese bridge, or a Chinese lantern. . . . 



10 

Meanwhile, the imminent arrival is announced, for 
three o'clock this afternoon at Victoria Station, of 
His Majesty Bai Faruna, King of Kawia, on the 
Gold Coast. . . . 



CORONATION TIME 23 



II 

But the real pathos of the situation is not revealed 
until we enter the swarming streets outside, gaudy 
with shields and banners which will not be used, and 
one must needs feel an emotion of deep sympathy for 
this great people, at the sight of the peculiar eloquence 
that now attaches to the inscription a thousand times 
repeated on the house-fronts and triumphal arches : 

" God save the King ! " 



CHAPTER III 
THE WALLACE COLLECTION 



I DO not think that any private collection can be 
compared with the bequest of the late mistress of 
Bagatelle. No public museum even surpasses the 
Wallace collection in certain branches : the French 
masters of the eighteenth century, the works of 
Francesco Guardi, the Sevres porcelain, the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth-century furniture. 

The visitor hesitates to make a choice. It sounds 
incredible, but there are, so to speak, almost no 
indifferent works at Hertford House. At the most, 
one might mention some rather dowdy pictures by 
Camille Roqueplan, about which Sir Richard Wallace 
was at one time bantered by M. Rochefort. But 
what marvels are here ! Fragonard's Fair-haired 
Child would justify the phrase which Reynolds 
applied to his own Strawberry Girl^ another gem in 
the same collection, when he described it as " one of 
the half-dozen original things which no man ever ex- 
ceeded in his life-work." No engraving, no copy 
will ever reproduce the dazzling freshness of those 



THE WALLACE COLLECTION 25 

bright colours, the white of the dress, the rose of 
the cheeks, the blue of the eyes, the light gold of the 
hair, all brought together, without fear of insipidity, 
by the happy daring of genius. 

The charming libertinism of The Swing attracts 
the public more. Old maids, haloed with innocence, 
stand long before the famous little masterpiece. 
They think it very *' French : " that word explains, 
conciliates, and absolves. They knew what they 
were going to see. When one goes to France or to 
look at French things, one is prepared. The expres- 
sion " shocking " implies a shock. 

Greuze, who is better represented here than at the 
Louvre or any other museum, never painted any- 
thing more successful than this portrait of Sophie 
Arnould, the lady who " made so little of it." Nor 
can we doubt, when we look at that voluptuous and 
smiling face, that " they liked it." 

Other portraits of persons famed for their fierce 
virtue are the Marquise de Pompadour^ by Boucher, 
and Lancret's Mademoiselle Camargo dancing. A 
Camargo in hoops and patches is dancing in a wood, 
to the sound of an orchestra hidden among the 
trees. Here is the madrigal which M. rAbb6 de 
Voisenon scribbled for the goddess of the Opera on 
the marble table of the pastry-cook at Cauterets, 
between two of the croquettes which he doted on : 

Aimable Camargo, ta danse a plus d'appas 
Loin de la foule, au fond de rustique bocage, 
Mais Pan rode la-bks, son ceil brille, je gage ; 

Piquante nymphe, crains-tu pas 

Un Dieu plus sensible que sage ? 



26 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Ou bien sous le zdphir qui I'effleure au passage, 
Ce beau sein reve-t-il, las d'un timide hommage, 
Aux baisers qu'on n'6vite pas ? 

Of the nine Watteaus, one prefers especially 
Gilles and his Family and The Fountain. What 
witchcraft is it that rivets you before that little piece 
of canvas, where nothing happens, where two tiny 
figures turn round a bason as large as a silver coin 
in flagrantly conventional attitudes ? 

Let us take off our hats, in passing, to a fine 
Portrait of a French Ecclesiastic by Philippe de 
Champaigne and enter the great gallery that takes up 
the whole breadth of Hertford House. The Titian 
rediscovered by Mr. Claude Phillips * here reigns in 
state. Then there is a Cima da Conegliano, an 
exquisite saint, the sight of which awakens memories 
of hours, never to be forgotten and never to return, 
spent among the things of Venice, a pure work 
evoking a whole peaceful and gentle reign of beauty. 
A little further, on the same wall, but from the 
depths of another history, of another genius, although 
always laughing towards the same eternal ideal, 
rises The Laughing Cavalier^ by Frans Hals. How 
he laughs ! What triumphant joy ! To be laid in 
a tomb and leave that laugh behind one is to cheat 
death. . . . Instinctively, you look for a word at the 
bottom of the frame. It seems, by some strange 
phenomenon, as if, before the eloquence of that face, 

* In one of the bath-rooms of the house ! The discovery 
does the greatest credit to the sympathetic scholar and 
artist that is the keeper of the Wallace collection. 



THE WALLACE COLLECTION 27 

you could not exist without knowing the name. 
Hals ! Laces, sashes, the gleam of golden wine in 
the crystal of a tall glass, the succulence of a cut 
pasty, blue eyes, yellow beards, heroic strokes, an 
ample and sovereign elegance never disfigured by 
bombast, a glamorous execution, a grace that makes 
sport of difficulties, hand on hip, feather in cap, an 
inimitable look of ease and of smiling defiance, a 
nature as rich and less sad than his brothers in 
talent and masterly skill, Velasquez and Gains- 
borough, 

More striking yet,^perhaps, through an almost super- 
natural intensity of concentrated life, is Rembrandt's 
lordly portrait of Suzanna van Collen^ wife of Jan 
Pellicorne. The old master of smoke and phosphorus, 
that brewer of ruddy darkness fraught with mysteries 
struggling to express themselves, to blaspheme or 
bemoan their fate, that visionary who exalts or 
bruises himself with his magnificent discipline has 
here found again the inspiration of tragic serenity to 
which we owe his portrait oi Elizabeth Bas. 

Not far from here hangs The " Rainbow " Land- 
scape, in which Rubens has made the transfigured 
nature of Flanders throb with his richest fevers. 

The English school on the end wall displays some 
of its most incontestable master-pieces. Reynolds 
and Gainsborough here vie with each other in their 
portraits of Mrs. Robinson. The second seems to 
show more uneasiness before the female model than 
did that mysterious Reynolds, whom Nelly O'Brien 
(see her pretty picture beside the other) loved all her 



28 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

life in vain. Miss Siddons, on the other hand, 
the daughter of the great actress whose portrait he 
has left us, died of love for Lawrence. So great, at 
that time, was the fascination of the artist for women 
of taste. 

Reynolds, to return to him, painted nothing more 
seductive than the full-length portrait of Mrs. Rivett 
Carnac. No one could give more life to the supple- 
ness of that young body swathed in soft, white 
stuffs, that young body which is no longer virginal, 
but deliciously fashioned, in its chaste self-surrender, 
by the sacred acts of life. A narrow border of gold 
separates the flesh of the breast from the drapery of 
the body. A scarf falls from one shoulder, slips 
from around the waist, floats illusively. The headr 
dress of light feathers, one of which is pink, crowns 
the mass of ash-coloured hair, against a back- 
ground of russet branches, in the royal magnificence 
of a northern September, with its twilights of purple 
skies and gilded mountain-tops. 

What has become of the beauties of that time? 
Where are Lady Blessington, Lady Lincoln, Mrs. 
Nesbitt, the adorable Perdita, the large hats, the 
tall powdered heads, all that cycle of unparalleled 
and patrician grace, as remote from the more animal 
seductiveness of the women of the time of Charles XL 
as from the great elegant, but rather hard line of the 
fair Englishwomen of to-day ? O mystery and melan- 
choly ! Handsome King George IV. (a little puffy 
for all that, flaxen-haired and bloated, with a com- 
plexion that suggests the little rose-whipped pos- 



THE WALLACE COLLECTION 29 

teriors of Tiepolo's cherubs) thrusts out perpetually 
to the edge of the frame in which Lawrence im- 
prisoned him his shapely calf cased in dove-coloured 
silk ; nothing remains of the dead graces that rustled 
around him. That charming world seems to have 
returned to dust, with the pleasures and pains that 
belonged to it. Henceforth, it is the prey of the 
poets, those jackals of sentiment. Certainly, they 
will find much to dream of in those vanished years 
which saw the friendships and the loves of mortals 
so incomparably charming as Lady Lincoln and that 
young Lee whom Lawrence painted and whose 
portrait M. Groult jealously keeps in custody, in his 
collection in Paris, for the exceeding delight of a 
select and enlightened few. 

Then, to continue, here are pearly Guardis ; two 
plentiful collections of Bonington and Decamps ; the 
miniatures; a Blarenberghe that cost thirty thousand 
francs ; a splendid allegorical and sensuous Pourbus, 
languishing with serene and pompous felicity ; other 
marvels besides. . . . 



Among the furniture are some of the most perfect 
models of the French eighteenth century that exist 
and the revelation of a gilt chandelier, chased by 
Cafifieri, which bears witness how little was lacking 
to the Louis XV style to raise it from the domain of 
prettiness and frivolity to a superlative dignity ot 
line, 



30 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Near the metal-work is a series of those portraits 
in wax, modelled in the sixteenth century, some of 
which are so strangely alive ; pottery, glass, an 
abundance of treasures!; after which we come upon 
the finest museum of arms and armour in the world. 
Coats of damaskeened steel, some shapeless and 
terrible, others, on admirably set-up figures, preserv- 
ing the gracefulness of the virile outline ; oriental 
arms, with hilts of jade and ivory strewn with 
precious stones, hilts too small for European hands, 
in which I find again the delicate, sumptuous and 
cruel forms which I admired in India, in the palace 
of the Maharajah of Alwar ; culverins, pistols, 
dirks, morions, baselards : two-handed swords, 
daggers with cleft blades. ... A Renascence knife 
holds the amazed attention : the blade is continued 
by a silver cloud which embraces a naked figure, 
doubtless Ixion, and, standing above the straining 
group of man and divine meteor of which the Cen- 
taurs are to be born, a graceful and unexpected 
statuette forms the pommel : Temperance, it appears, 
although she pours a little silver stream from the 
ewer which she raises with her right arm into the 
cup which her left hand holds. This signal and tiny 
master-piece, an enchantment of lines and curves in 
which lives all the creative fury (harmonious, in the 
apparent incoherency of the myths and attributes, 
by dint of sheer joyousness and transport) that 
tortured the Tuscan Renascence, comes, Mr. Phillips 
assures me, from Verrocchio's workshop, 



THE WALLACE COLLECTION 31 



3 
London may well be proud of this museum, both 
for the works which it contains and the manner in 
which they are shown to the best advantage. Our 
national museums could here easily learn some 
lessons of taste — and, shall I say, of integrity ? 



CHAPTER IV 
SOCIETY— SUPPERS— SPORT 



She was charming, a little nervous among the 
orchids, this versatile widow, who edits a luxurious 
review, nurses the wounded, rushes off to South 
Africa at duty's summons and finds time to get 
married when it is love that calls. The groom, who 
did not seem greatly put out by his family's absence, 
looked magnificent and reminded one of his sister, 

the dazzling Princess of , a beauty lustrous to 

the point of indiscretion and a little too animated, 
they say, for her august, conventional, mediatized 
German family-in-law. 

To return to the wedding : it was marked by no 
shrinking privacy. No young innocence could have 
surrendered itself with greater candour. The bride's 
family was very well represented, with, in the front 
pew, the dowager duchess, who would have chosen 
her time badly had she forsaken her sister-in-law 
then ; and the bride's son (a very harmonious 
phrase), the famous war-correspondent, besides 
many lords of greater or lesser importance, whose 



SOCIETY 33 

faces assumed very comic expressions, ladies screw- 
ing up their eyes to show how greatly they were 
touched by the romance of it all, men who seemed on 
the point of proclaiming from the summit of their 
stand-up collars the imprescriptible rights of love 
over social convention. The moral of all this ? The 
old axiom of Theleme : *' Fats ce que vouldras." But 
upon one condition : that you do not lose sight of 
style. Style is everything. Style is the harmonious 
dispensing of elements which, on analysis, resolve 
into nothing. 

In conclusion, two very characteristic features : 
instead of each giving separately the traditional 
asparagus-tongs or set of silver-gilt spoons, a 
dozen well-to-do persons have clubbed together to 
present the bride with a diamond tiara. But the 

new Mrs. will not wear it just yet : the young 

couple are off on their honeymoon — to the Transvaal ! 
He is going to fight, she to look after her hospitals. 
Gunpowder, iodoform, the rock-stained veldt, white 
beds under the yellow lamp, adventure, pain, glory ; 
a curious and powerful exaltation of sensibility 
which, after all, is as good as the beadles and pifferari 
of the days when our grandmothers travelled no 
farther than Sorrento. 



We are at the Covent Garden Opera. The feast 
for the eyes is not brilliant to-night in a house 
plunged in darkness by the Wagnerian rite. They 

c 



34 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

are playing Das Rheingold. Through the semi- 
gloaming, we vaguely distinguish the boxes. Above 
us is the Princess of Wales, motionless, accompanied 
by the Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein 
(whose husband, if I be not mistaken, was that 
evening restoring the aesthetic equilibrium of the 
family by seeing A Runaway Girl at the Gaiety). In 
a box opposite, the anxious and disconcerted eye 
looks in vain to-night for Lady de G . 

Here is Lady C B , one of the pillars 

of the temple, and with her Lady G , slender 

and exquisite, the author of dainty drawings and 
"expressive portraits," which Burne- Jones might have 
envied. Very simply dressed, with no tiara nor even 
a wreath of leaves in her hair (the ladies are wearing 
their heads largely in the druid style, in London, 
this season), is she, who, at one of the drawing-rooms 
of late years, appeared in the same dress which her 

husband's ancestress, the beautiful Duchessof R , 

wore at her wedding in 1775, white and gold brocade 
strewn with roses, and on her head a coronet of 
wonderful diamonds that once belonged to Nell 
Gwyn, the favourite of Charles II. Shall we not 
hope one day at the Elysee to see the Comtesse 

G in one of those tunics with which Madame 

Tallien used to dazzle the " balls of victims " of 1790? 

Here also is the Marquise d' , an English- 
woman by birth, whose husband brought her one of 
the greatest names in Auvergne. An elegant woman, 
of the most assured elegance, she defies all competi- 
tion. She could be nothing else, one realizes that ; 



SUPPERS 35 

and, if, by chance, one dark day, an event of any sort 
should compel her to some merely middle-class 
course, one feels that it would be done with her, 
that henceforth she would drag on only a languid 
and unprized life : Prince Rupert's drops crumble 
to powder if you break their delicate stems: Very 
fair, by dint of living with the Queen she has 
ended by resembling Her Majesty and the whole 
series of Enghsh royal highnesses, whose clear-cut 
type can be recognized a hundred miles away. 



3 

At the supper that followed, actors and many 
members of the audience met under a roof that is 
always hospitable to artists, a roof of a kind of 
which there are many more in London than in 
Paris. Nothing is more typical than this mingling, 
in England, of people in society with people on the 
stage. Shakspeare undoubtedly rehabilitated the 
actor's profession there for good, which is more than 
Moliere succeeded in doing in France. Why? I 
think that it is due, to some extent, to a superstitious 
respect for the ministers of a religion, art, which 
retains greater mysteries for a civilization of which 
it represents not the soul, the very life, as with 
us (who, for that matter, exaggerate its importance), 
but rather an expensive and cultured luxury. Dis- 
cipline in admiration characterizes in the highest 
degree the average aesthetic notions of the English- 



36 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

man, especially in music. Wagner's genius, once 
promoted to the rank of an accepted idea and con- 
firmed by the patronage of the royal family, reigned 
thenceforth in all its glory. It is a question of 
snobbism (in the sense, applied to art, which we 
give to the word by extension) dignified by loyalty : 
another form of that hypocrisy which is so often 
laid at our neighbours' door and which none the less, 
remains a social virtue of the highest order. 

Be this as it may, a Frenchman will not find him- 
self sitting without surprise between Lady , the 

mother of one of the noblest polo-players of the 
Bagatelle Club, who achieved distinction by intro- 
ducing in Paris, in July, the fashion of wearing 
white duck trousers under a frock-coat, and Mrs.. 

, the English Rejane, who is thinking of playing 

Zaza and, meanwhile, by the side of her husband, 
astounds with the piquancy of her facial play the 
spectators of Shakspeare's Julius Ccesar^ marvel- 
lously revived. 

The mistress of the house presides at the head of 
a table of Germans, all in beards and spectacles, 
excepting Mottl, who sits on her right. 

The host, seated between Lady L and Lady 

R , is full of stories of a trip to Norway for 

which he deserted his parliamentary duties for some 

days. Near us, Lady E displays her delicate 

beauty, immortalized by the famous quarrel with 
Whistler on the subject of a portrait, and Lady 

H B , the belle of the season, sits smiling 

between the giant Fafnir and one of the heroes of 



SUPPERS 37 

the Jameson raid. All this is neither commonplace 
nor Bohemian, but in perfect good taste and very 
amusing into the bargain. 

Only, the supper is too good, if only because of 
the dressed-up dishes of the old school : " surprise " 
sandwiches that remind you of everything except 
sandwiches ; ingenious disguises of clandestine eat- 
ables; dainties in dominoes. . . . And, withal, 
champagne drier than a speech by Mr. Chamberlain. 



4 

Supper at the Carlton, again after the Opera. 
Something of a rabble, with a less pronounced air 
of fashion than at our Ritz's (although with similar 
contrasts of niggers and princes of the Blood), 
whereas, at the Opera and, generally, at all the 
English theatres, the appearance of the house is 
always more brilliant than with us. 

Quite close to our party, a lady dressed out in a 
sort of burnoose is bright blue with turquoises as 
big as macaroons : she suggests a camel-driver who 
has struck a mine. At the next table, the military 
attache at Paris is entertaining some ladies, including 

Lady Maud W , one of the Englishwomen in 

society who have a sincere love of music and who 
are to be seen in Paris listening to Palestrina at 
Saint-Gervais. There are also theatrical people, 
people of every sort, too many people. ... A 
crowd clashes with one's sense of what is chic. It 



38 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

lends itself to displays of picturesqueness, strength 
or magnificence, but chic has nothing to do, for the 
moment, with these excessive sentiments. It will 
come. This barbarous monosyllable, which arouses 
such different ideas, according to the brains which 
it reaches, is, after all, the lisping accent of a superior 
harmony, or, simply, an ideal that stammers its way 
through the ingenuousness and oddity of men's 
appetites and vanities. 



5 

Hurlingham. Imagine an enormous Puteaux, a 
space large enough to contain several lies Roth- 
schild, with polo-grounds, cricket-fields, tennis- 
courts, pigeon-shooting and the like. We have 
come to lunch here after the biannual meet of the 
Coaching Club and a score of heavy drags, filled 
with bright dresses and dark frock-coats, are drawn 
up, with their horses taken out, around the polo- 
ground. Ah, for how little we count, in the matter 
of open-air games, beside these people ! During 
the polo-match, one of the players, who has already 
received a black eye from a mallet in the course of 
a furious melee of yellow boots, padded breeches, 
dripping jackets, haggard and shouting faces, 
stumbles, falls, with his pony on top of him, lies 
motionless. A cry comes from the next coach ; 
a young girl gives signs of the greatest agitation : a 
sister, no doubt, or a weeping " intended." Some- 
one asks her, in a sympathetic voice : 



SPORT 39 

" Do you know him ? " 

" Oh, yes, it's Captain So-and-so. If only it had 
been one of the hussars I " (The match is being 
played between a team of life-guards and one of 
hussars). 

The player lies stretched, as though dead, and 
the girl refuses to be consoled and moans : 

" Oh, how disappointed he will be ! " 

A rather pretty love-phrase, is it not ? 



I ponder, during this long afternoon, on the 
psychology of the sportsman. It is much less 
simple than one thinks. Sport, like travel, is some- 
thing very close to action. What am I saying? 
It is pure action, freed from the tyranny of motive. 
Any motive that resists analysis must be either 
absurd or base. Every active conception of life 
has a share of imbecility. But action is an imperious 
need for certain choice natures. Let us act, there- 
fore, but beware of having an object ; let us display 
in all their harmony our vigour, our skill, the gifts 
which, did we deign to let them, would ensure us 
easy conquests : is sport anything else ? The sages 
of the future will be oarsmen or bicyclists. For 
that matter, one of these days, there will be nothing 
else left to do : war will be as out of date as " pigeon- 
holes." The muscular age will create its own philo- 
sophy. The Greeks began in this way, but humanity, 



40 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

at that glorious stage, had not yet issued from the 
battlesome phase. We are breaking out of it now. 
Let us then learn to honour the athlete. He has 
expanded in force and rhythm the faculties destined 
by nature for criminal ends. Also, he is a poet. 



CHAPTER V 
SOME THEATRES 



I BELIEVE that the art of the scene-painter has never 
reahzed anything to be compared with certain scenes 
in Shakspeare's Twelfth Night, as placed upon the 
stage by Mr. Tree. Nowhere, not in Paris, nor at 
Bayreuth, nor even in London, where Sir Henry 
Irving, nevertheless, obtained memorable results, 
has anything like it been done. To restore to the 
work its setting is a meritorious thing, but needs 
only some erudition and a little conscientiousness ; 
on the other hand, to give it back its atmosphere, 
while striking the special note of the creative genius 
that peopled it with the phantoms of his imagination 
(especially if the play be enacted in the realms of 
fancy, in a shadowy duchy of Illyria, on the border- 
land of reality and dreams) is a task which demands 
a poet and in which the reconstructive artist is able 
to make himself the equal of the greatest. 

From the lap of those wonderful, deep, spacious 
arm-chairs that compose the stalls, the spectator sees 
the stage behind an empty space beneath which 



42 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the orchestra lies hidden under a roof strewn with 
palm-leaves. This forms a sort of threshold decked 
for a feast. Beyond it, the great bay, which is 
closed, for very short intervals, by sumptuous 
purple curtains embroidered with royal crowns, 
opens generously upon fairyland. 

Of the five scenes of the evening, three are quite 
remarkable. But the gardens of Olivia are a marvd. 
That hideous thing, the stage with its level boards, 
has disappeared. Three successive platforms form 
three uneven terraces covered with a carpet of long 
grass and joined by grass-grown steps. They are 
as it were three landings of the long, ascending walk 
that plunges into the blue distance shaded by masses 
of greenery. Rich clusters of flowering rhododen- 
drons form an irregular border to it. On the left, a 
marble bridge strides over a valley of lawns and 
cascades. A carved bench, standing among camellias 
planted in the ground, and a close-clipped box 
hedge suggest the somewhat conventional grace of 
the sixteenth century and harmonize with Malvolio's 
huge, starched ruff and with the crimson satin 
farthingale in which Olivia will soon be walking 
over the mosses of the park. The book which she 
has just closed, with a flower to mark her place, has 
dropped to the ground near the bench. One feels 
that this is a favourite corner and the whole scene 
gives an impression of a fairy summer, of ample 
leisure, of pleasing grace, of a landscape eminently 
suited to the maddest adventures of poetry and love. 

The groups herein contained, the beautiful dresses, 



SOME THEATRES 43 

by Mr. Percy Anderson, are arranged with a scru- 
pulous taste and decorative feeling that remind one 
of Watteau in his Emharquement pour Cythhre. And 
one perceives a constant happy solution of the 
problem of filling that immense stage with so slight 
an action, with such subtile emotions, with such 
fleeting charms. 

The actor has succeeded in causing to stand out, 
in surprising relief, against this dreamy, pastoral 
background the amazingly whimsical creation which 
he has made of Malvolio, the puritanical, vain, formal, 
pedantic steward whose mystification, driven to the 
point of cruelty, constitutes one of the motives of the 
comedy. His very outline is an inspiration, from 
his bald head, with its three aggressive whisps of 
hair, the comma-shaped tuft on his chin, the pict- 
uresque line of his lean legs, as expressive in their 
way as the world-famed hands of Sir Henry Irving, 
down to the long white wand with which he orders 
and regulates the evolutions of the servants of 
Olivia's household with a dancing-master's stiff and 
comical precision. He is the true image of cere- 
mony, etiquette and ritual, of that scholastic rigidity 
of the middle-ages which the supple, voluble, laughter- 
loving sixteenth century hated, a sort of Tartuffe, 
grotesque without being odious, an incarnation of 
superciliousness, pompousness, dryness and arti- 
ficiality that has something of Carlyle's Dryasdust 
and something of Don Quixote. For he preserves 
a certain dignity in spite of all and the actor has 
understood the fine genius for human pity of the 



44 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

great creators. Malvolio's blind and persistent love 
for Olivia, like that of Don Quixote for Dulcinea, 
approaches the emotional and the beautiful. 

We talk with Mr. Tree of these and many other 
things, after the performance, while he is doffing 
Malvolio's garb. He says some excellent things 
about the play in France. And then, suddenly, 
revealing one of those cases of inadaptability of 
vision which are inevitable, but always surprising, 
in a foreigner, he condemns the immorality of the 
Paris stage and quotes — the Theatre Rdaliste ! This 
evidently represents to him a type ; and I have great 
difficulty in explaining that this enterprise never 
enjoyed either notoriety or a public. Why is it that 
to people of this intelligent stamp the name of Paris 
but too often suggests the same associations as to 
an Anglo-Indian subaltern or to one of Offenbach's 
South- Americans ? 



To mention another theatrical impression, I have a 
pleasant memory of my evening at the Avenue, where 
they gave a sort of English Nouveau jeu called Lord 
and Lady Algy. It is not a study — the word is too 
serious — but a cursory glimpse of the fast, sporting 
world, which is not without dash. A young couple 
break apart and come together again amid the in- 
genuous action of a good-humoured plot. A deter- 
mined boldness of situation, if not of language, and a 
sort of easy gaiety have made a success of this slight 



SOME THEATRES 45 

work, from which all true observation seems to have 
been carefully banished. A very characteristic scene 
ends the last act and never fails to make its effect. 
Lord Algy arrives at a fancy-dress ball drunk, but 
desperately drunk : as drunk as a lord, to use the 
national phrase. The others turn their backs upon 
him because of a misunderstanding and, in the midst 
of the general affront offered to him (his very jockey, 
whom he has brought with him disguised as Prince 
Charles Stuart, deserts him at that moment : he, too, 
for that matter, is drunk), his wife, from whom he 
has been living almost separated, chivalrously and 
publicly takes his part in these words : 

" Come along, Algy dear, I'll get you a cab." 

Fairly English, is it not ? 



3 

The Little Minister shows a delicate observation of 
the rustic centres of Presbyterian Scotland. That is 
a charming scene where, in their Sunday clothes, 
before going to the little kirk whose windows gleam 
at the back of the stage, the elders of the village read 
the love-lines which they have discovered on the 
table of the manse and discuss by moonlight the 
recall of the boy minister whom they adore and who 
loves a gipsy. Fortunately, this gipsy is none 
other than the daughter of the laird and all is 
arranged, of course. 

Another piece by the same author, Mr. J. M. Barrie, 



46 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

one of the most justly popular English playwrights, 
supplies a remarkable document on the profound 
sense of inequality which is one of the social forces 
of England. The Admirable Crichton is the story of a 
butler in the service of a radical peer who is wrecked, 
together with his family and servants, in the course 
of a yachting-trip. Through the change of circum- 
stances, Crichton, who is endowed with superior 
faculties, attains to a sort of autocracy in the little 
social group that has formed on the desert island. 
He reveals powers of organization and conquest and 
is on the point of marrying the daughter of the old 
peer, who, in his turn, has soon been relegated 
to the lowest rank of social usefulness, when a ship 
passes and takes the exiles back to their country. In 
the last act, the great man has once more become the 
perfect butler, automatically resumes his rank in the 
all-powerful hierarchy of caste and ultimately settles 
down in ^* a little public-house, my lord, in the Har- 
row Road — the more fashionable end." 

The first act is delightful and the whole constitutes 
a most instructive study of the English soul. Cer- 
tainly, they are right who call the theatre the mirror 
of manners. An exhaustive study of the dramatic art 
of a people would supply the place of all the rest. 



4 

I am also sent to see a piece played, rather heavily, 
by Mr. Lewis Waller : Monsieur Beaucaire. Another 



SOME THEATRES 47 

feature of the English character is revealed in this 
work, which, from the artistic point of view, is crude 
and childish. The hero, who is a Frenchman, is 
always cutting a fine figure and this at the expense 
of the English, who are by turns hoaxed, tricked and 
beaten, at all of which the audience takes not the 
slightest umbrage. Imagine an Englishman in a 
similar position in a French play : he would not be 
endured. This feature of the English race has a 
dignity which we may well envy. 

I should like to mention also the English musical 
comedy, not to speak of the pantomimes, both definite 
and original dramatic forms. The desultoriness of a 
plot with which logic and proportion have nothing to 
do, the mixture of absurdity and sentiment, the 
peculiarly pretty music and dancing, the beauty of 
the women, the richness of the dresses and scenery 
all go to make up spectacles very disconcerting to 
our Atticism, but having an incontestable charm. 
Nor have we the right to be particular, seeing that 
we possess that most abject of all entertainments, the 
cafe- concert. 

5 
To return to the drama in England, the general 
impression which one is apt to receive is that the 
plays are not written for grown-up people (we except, 
of course, works of superior merit, such as, for in- 
stance, the master-pieces of Mr. Pinero). The theatre 
in this country seems as it were a show for easily- 



48 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

pleased schoolboys. The same remark covers the 
novels. In England, Jules Verne would have become 
a popular novelist for readers of every age (they have 
Rider Haggard to prove it). What these men of 
action want is a story, a plot, action, in short ; they 
ask for nothing better than serial fiction. The 
study of mere manners sends them to sleep. Their 
greatest writers have clung to plots in their books : 
Thackeray, Stevenson, Meredith himself. They have 
had to do with a public that wishes to be amused 
with adventures and does not care a straw for 
psychology. 

And, once that you are back in the street and 
walk down Pall Mall, where the great clubs send 
percolating through their blinds the silent light in 
which the evening papers rustle, you feel a great 
need to wring the necks of every theatrical manager 
in Paris, with only one or two exceptions. For you 
have learnt that it is possible to make of an evening 
at the play something approaching a pleasure. It is 
possible to reduce to a vanishing-point the functions 
of the rapacious or insolent box-keeper and to do 
away with her tips. It is possible to seat the 
spectator comfortably, with room to stretch out his 
legs without digging his knees into the back of the 
lady before him. It is possible virtually to abolish 
that plague, the entr'acte (notwithstanding the com- 
plicated stage-setting, which is infinitely more 
detailed and elaborate than ours) ; to begin at half- 
past eight and finish shortly after eleven. It is 
possible to place upon the boards a collection of 



SOME THEATRES 49 

women who are neither ugly nor decrepit. It is 
possible, lastly, to achieve a stage-setting from 
which the action of the drama derives truth, emo- 
tion, poetry or grandeur, instead of losing, in the 
poverty and shabbiness of an antiquated convention, 
such grandeur, poetry, emotion or truth as the 
drama is capable of containing ! Until now, M. 
Antoine alone has shown us some of these possi- 
bilities. His success has paid him. Why do the 
others not follow suit ? 

The charm of living is declining with us in a pro- 
nounced manner, is decreasing day by day. We no 
longer even know how to give a dance ! One would 
console one's self for many things, presuming that 
one were resigned, at the thought that we are 
perishing gracefully, that we are paying attention 
to our dying words, that we shall at least leave a 
fair regret behind us. When, in the palace at the 
end of the mole of Alexandria, Antony and Cleopatra 
led the inimitable life, their mourning of all earthly 
hope was dignified by passion and beauty. But 
with us there is none of this, nothing but a general 
mediocrity, the Panboeotianism of which Renan 
speaks, a sordidness, an ugliness that spare nothing. 
Our clever men are not clever enough and our men 
of action too clever. 



CHAPTER VI 

SOME HOUSES— THE THAMES 



It is not a paradox to declare that the cult of the 
home, that eminently British characteristic (to judge 
by the current stereotypes), does not prevent the 
Englishman from throwing open his house or letting 
it pass into the hands of strangers much more readily 
than the Frenchman and, still more, the Italian or 
the Spaniard. Before you have left cards, in fact 
the first time that he sees you, the Saxon's hospitable 
instincts bring to his lips the classic " Come and 
lunch." In France, the least invitation counts as a 
mark of peculiar amiability. In Italy, they hardly 
ever invite you to a meal, although they accept one 
gladly from you, oh, only so as not to appear to look 
down upon the ways of those \yovih.y forestieri! I shall 
always remember the story of the greatest noble- 
man in Florence inviting a German of equal birth to 
his own, who had been particularly recommended to 
him, to take coffee after lunch, in order that they 
might afterwards go through the collections con- 
tained within the hewn masonry of the old palazzo. 



SOME HOUSES 51 

On the other hand, it is quite usual, in England, 
to let an historic castle to some American or other, 
a thing almost unheard-of with us, although, to tell 
the truth, in Italy, most of the old palaces are occu- 
pied, at least partially, by tenants : 

" Ma che ! . . . E tutto per bisogno ! " 

How are we to judge these different shades of 
hospitality and respect for the home ? Are we to 
say that the Englishman is the more hospitable ? 
It would, on the whole, be difficult to maintain the 
opposite. And yet one might infer, in the French- 
man, a refinement of that politeness which looks 
upon the giving of an invitation not as an honour 
offered, but as an honour received, from which a 
privilege accrues to the host and not to the guest : 
it is a favour which may be only discreetly asked 
and which it would be in bad taste to beg before 
one is able to foresee the acceptance of one's request. 
But the envious rudeness of our republican manners 
has long ago done away with such scruples as these. 
No, let the foreigners be reassured : if they are not 
more frequently entertained, it is through shortness 
of comprehension, lack of curiosity or stinginess 
alone. 

We are punished for it by the false notions which 
they very properly conceive of a private life which 
they are never invited to admire. The French 
family, that model of the homely virtues, which 
Greuze and Berquin revealed, in their most touching 
aspect, more than a century ago, represents, in 
the eyes of a public brought up on the 3/r. 50 



52 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

novel, only an institution for the convenient practice 
of the domestic vices. As for Paris, its visitors 
know that its heart beats at the Moulin Rouge and 
that its attractions in the matter of naughtiness are 
beyond compare. The serious investigators, for 
their part, instal themselves in the Latin Quarter : 
there is quite a school of young novelists and old 
ones too that has pitched its tent among our future 
druggists and pettifoggers and sat down to rewrite 
Miirger and the follies and sentimentalities, now 
both out of date, of La Vie de Boheme. When those 
writers venture to describe the familiar surroundings 
of our middle or upper classes, one obtains results 
as comical as those of The Visits of Elizabeth, for 
instance, in which country-house life in Normandy 
appeared as it were distorted through the imagina- 
tion of some writer of burlesques in the moon. 

It is true that, if we ventured upon a picture of 
country-house life in England, it would perhaps be 
quite as funny. M. Bourget himself, who would 
have invented it, has not dared to go so far. 

To tell the truth, one does not begin to know 
people until one has passed through their hall-doors. 
The home is as significant a part of the individual 
as the shell is of the moUusk. Let me take the 
intelligent and curious reader through a few English 
houses selected at random. The excursion may 
prove instructive. 



SOME HOUSES 53 



Holland House. Who's Who gives the number 
of acres possessed by the noble owner of this un- 
equalled residence : the figure must be taken to 
include the seventy acres of park which, in the 
middle of London, amid its secular oaks and its 
lawns broad as moors, isolate the old mansion that 
has witnessed so much of the country's history and 
is rich in so many memories. 

Here is a peculiarity of this country : the allu- 
viums of the past have been deposited without 
confusion, no violent convulsion has mingled their 
successive layers ; the work of man has grown like 
the work of the soil, each season of history has 
helped towards this end by fruitful harvests or new 
crops ; one can follow the development of the group 
of mankind that has had its cradles and its tombs 
in this island without being baffled by gaps or cata- 
clysms. In a given residence, for instance, to the 
main building, in the Tudor style, have been added 
wings of the time of the Stuarts ; next, the Dutch 
influences that came over with the house of Nassau 
have flung over the whole the somewhat clumsy good- 
humour of their heavily -rounded balusters or of their 
escutcheons of grey stone corroded by the fogs. 

Certainly, this splendid house has not the dignity 
of proportion and line of a building by Palladio. 
These northern skies do not invite the pure outlines 
of marble to the nuptials of the sunlight and the 



54 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

blue. The undeniable sense of charm that escapes 
from these crumbling bricks, these dark creepers, 
these carvings resembling those of a Flemish chest 
more nearly approaches that which we experience 
in the presence of the captivating bad taste of a 
Monplaisir, a Franconian or Wiirtemberg Hermitage 
than the emotion produced by the fa9ade or the 
cortile of a Sienese or Vicentian palazzo. 

But where else in the world shall we find a collec- 
tion of marvels so homogeneous as that which crowds 
the rooms of the old abode of Fox ? It is a constant 
collaboration of artistic interest with historical emo- 
tion : this master-piece by Reynolds represents a 
scene the actors in which lived under this roof; in 
this immense oak-panelled, book-lined gallery hangs 
an engraving which shows the room as it was 
two hundred years ago ; that dressing-room was 
decorated for the purpose of a ball given in honour 
of Charles I. ; here is the card-table, in Florentine 
pietradura, at which Fox played. And in the glass 
cases are a thousand priceless nicknacks and keep- 
sakes, relics of Mary Stuart and Napoleon, tokens 
of august visits and interviews. 

All this past is revealed in the voice of the master 
of the house, than whom one could have no better 
guide ; and the intoxication of history is exhaled on 
every side. It accompanies you even to the gardens, 
which are quite admirable : French flower-beds, 
Flemish box hedges, leafy Italian arcades; an 
mmense room, orangery and ball-room in one, whos e 
tarnished mirrors remember Bruramel's last necktie ; 



SOME HOUSES 55 

retreats in which marble slabs perpetuate the memory 
and the preference of some dead poet or parliamen- 
tary figure ; fountains, basons, statues, clusters of 
old trees; horizons of greenery that deaden the 
murmur of the huge metropolis, the deferential sentry 
of an aristocratic and sumptuous leisure. . . . 

No, I do not think that any other country could 
show the like of such a residence. In Poland, at the 
castles of some of the great nobles, each guest has 
his own pavilion, his own horses, servants and the 
rest. But could we hope to find there this supreme 
luxury of the past, of uninterrupted tradition, per- 
petuated by the works of fidelity and beauty of a 
civilization worthy of the name ? 

With us, the revolutions have left nothing of this 
kind standing. Our old residences, sacked or rebuilt, 
have all changed hands. And which of them could 
compare as a town-mansion with Holland House? 
La Muette, the first of which one thinks, would look 
like a cottage beside it. ... I see hardly anything 
except the Park of Sceaux, so close to Paris,' of 
which Versailles envies the glorious elm hedges, 
green walls fifteen feet high, hollowed out with shady 
niches for nymphs and gods. . . . And even there 
the Duchesse de Maine's chateau was destroyed 
during the Terror. 

3 
Whereas with us, on the Seine, all that has to do 
with boating assumes a low and more or less shop- 



56 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

walking character, the case is just the opposite on the 
Thames. A man has his country-house on the 
water's edge, asks a party down from Saturday to 
Monday (London being impossible on Sundays) and 
all in very good style. The house is simple, often 
displaying a refined rusticity. Its luxury lies in the 
beautifully-kept lawn that slopes down to the bank, 
the earth of which is protected by a wooden wall. 
Beside the landing-stage is the round-roofed boat- 
house, covered with creepers. It shelters the light- 
oared skiffs, the soft-cushioned punt, the electric or 
steam launch. A willow droops its boughs to the 
water level. Tall trees grow in clusters, with flowers 
at their foot. The garden-chairs stand crowded 
round the tea-table. The men and women, in light 
clothes, roam about the walks at will. Every one is 
free : the host has not that look which he would be 
sure to wear in France, the look of a hen that has 
been sitting on a brood of ducklings. And this has 
its undoubted charm. 

A man of taste will succeed in achieving in this 
order of things a master-piece of installation at once 
countrified and artistic. I have been spending 
Sunday and the Bank Holiday after in an ex- 
quisite cottage near Bray, between Windsor and 
Maidenhead. Standing on a backwater of the 
Thames, opposite Monkey Island, where the rain has 
pitilessly soaked the tents of a camp similar to many 
pitched along the river, the house, with its wooden 
gables, wreathes its porch in roses and wellingtonias. 
Inside reign gleaming chintzes, flowered cretonnes, 



THE THAMES 57 

a dainty wealth of old china and silver, an apparently 
careless, but really laboured refinement of comfort, 
the most studied artlessness. In front of the house 
is a flower-garden in the old Flemish style, with 
clipped yews in boxes, straight and formal walks 
and, in the middle of a trim and demure lawn, an old 
gilt sun-dial on a stone plinth. Further away, at 
the end of a long arbour of ivy, stands an isolated 
music-room, furnished in the quaintest style : old 
Dutch settles, bought during a trip to Zealand and 
Friesland, painted chairs, with a sea-piece on each 
rail of the back, heavy arm-chairs, like those in 
Pieter de Hooch's interiors, made for copious 
slumbers after mighty feasts. A lantern inspired by 
the Chinese lanterns, with a landscape on each of 
its parchment panes, hangs from the wooden ceiling ; 
and the red-brick stove is adorned with gleaming 
brasses, skimmers, pans, snuffers, arranged along 
the edge of the mantel of the fire-place with its black 
fire-dogs. But for the ottomans, the grand piano, 
the portrait of Wagner in a carved oak frame, one 
would think one's self at Zutphen or Groningen. 

The village, a mile away, is very Enghsh, on the 
contrary, although quite as old-fashioned and charm- 
ingly decorative : a flint church, four centuries old, 
standing in the middle of the grave-yard where the 
grave-digger has his house ; narrow streets with 
overhanging eaves of the time of Charles I. and little 
leaded window-panes ; a hospital adorned with a 
statue of the founder, over a commemorative tablet, 
built with the infinite charm of the late Gothic style ; 



58 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the clipped box hedges form a soft contrast with the 
bricks of the walls edged with white stone and the 
whole retains that distinctive mark of old things 
on English soil : a look of age that is not decrepit. 
The same thoughts that made them spring from the 
ground have remained familiar and sacred to the race 
which they have faithfully sheltered, Yonder, on 
the horizon, the Round Tower or keep of Windsor 
Castle looks new and carries with unbent brow the 
silken standard that tells us that the King is there. 
Where have I seen this poetic alms-house before ? 
Yes, I remember : it forms the scene of Fred 
Walker's picture, that melancholy Harbour of Refuge, 
bathed in the golden light of the sun setting on the 
foreheads of life's victims. 

It is drawing near evening and I am taken along 
the graceful river to Maidenhead, with perhaps the 
prettiest bridge in the neighbourhood of London. The 
pale sky is filled with subtile ,'rays ; all things are 
bathed in a cool, transparent light. The house-boats 
along the banks display their flower-clad roofs and 
jostle one another under the drooping foliage of the 
river-side beeches. Skiffs pass us, impelled by vigor- 
ous arms. The little hotels of the town look like 
pious foundations for tennis-players and oarsmen ; 
the locks fill with boats crowded together, whose 
occupants watch one another discreetly and silently. 
And, among the great rain-clouds, the setting sun 
seems to be forging copper rainbows on a golden 
anvil. 



THE THAMES 59 



4 

We French have nothing between the castle and 
the suburban villa : we do not know how to live 
in the country, when we do not dwell there per- 
manently, except in pomp and state or rusticating. 

The English have the country-house. This is 
not the aristocratic seat, with its immense grounds, 
its endless swards with herds of belling deer, where 
the dying sun sets fire to the tall windows and gilds 
the pompous statues of the Jacobean frontals, but a 
roomy house, of almost affected simplicity (I do 
not speak of the many villas on the banks of the 
Thames, which sometimes reveal — O delightful 
epithet ! — a " meretricious " taste), with comfortable 
furniture, old oak, bright cretonnes, cool and shiny 
chintzes printed with great bunches of roses, so per- 
fectly adapted to the afternoon naps of summer. 

The real luxury is the garden. There, a charming 
imagination gives itself free scope. How stiff is 
still our notion of the English garden ! Here, the 
love of nature is more direct, more observant. They 
love her very wildness, they even suggest it, at 
times. For instance, in the botanic gardens at 
Kew, I have seen a seed-plot of poppies in the midst 
of prickly broom ! Thus is an underwood furnished, 
We have no idea of any such studied simplicity. 

The Dutch garden, with its box cut into the 
semblance of beasts and birds and the formality of 
its flagged walks ; the Italian garden, where, in the 



6o THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

rosaries, some semi-circular stone bench bears an 
inscription such as : 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may ; 

the rcck-garden, filled with dainty ferns and tough 
little mountain plants ; the Japanese garden, watered 
by a slow brook where one steps on flat stones 
placed at intervals among the irises and gladioli, 
while a stone perfume-burner outlines its curious 
shape against the cunningly-shaded backgrounds of 
maple and bamboo and a bronze toad, squatting at 
the edge of an oblong pond, watches the reflection 
of the moon : all this forms a real epitome of the 
art of gardens. 

Amid this variety, which does not exclude the 
indispensable croquet-lawn and tennis-court, the 
guests move about according to their fancy, free to 
roam alone or to pair off as they will, without being 
pursued by a panting hostess eager to " amuse " 
them whether they wish it or no, as happens among 
us, who are a people too unaccustomed to hospitality 
not to conceive an exaggerated notion of its duties. 



5 

The river laps gently against the tarred planks 
that contain its banks. Here are lawns so trimly 
mowed that, as you row past, you feel inclined to 
pat them with your hand, affectionately, like the 
back of a good green poodle. The thick grass 



THE THAMES 6i 

grows to the top of the black planks. Clusters 
of bright flowering plants run to the foot of the 
veranda of the low houses, all different in shape and 
structure under their ivy or virginia-creepers and yet 
all resembling one another. 

The Thames is not here the muddy and mighty 
estuary laden with colliers, torn by the stems of the 
tugs, bestridden by bridges flying high above the 
masts of the ships, but an easy-going nymph, 
bringing from its native meadows careless memories 
of hills and pastures, of sheep round as balls, of 
Gothic colleges and Norman towers. It loses a 
little of its rusticity in this mundane valley through 
which it flows between Maidenhead and Windsor. 

Towering at some height above it, on one of the 
few eminences in this hardly undulating landscape, 
amidst the trees of an extensive park stands Clieveden, 
purchased by a superlatively rich American from the 
late Duke of Westminster. It is a very large villa 
in the Italian style, having nothing in common with 
the old manors of Scotland or Wales, with their 
moats, their battlements of the Tudor times, their 
dark towers and their haunted rooms (oh, what fine 
ghost-stories they know in this country !). The 
terrace that stretches in front of the house is bord- 
ered by a magnificent stone Renascence balustrade, 
where recessed benches stand here and there on their 
pedestals of handsome sculptured vases. This balus- 
trade has a rather mysterious legend attached to it. 
It is supposed to be a copy of that which adorns one 
of the most famous Roman villas. They declare that 



62 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

it was the original that left Italy and a copy that is 
now admired by the visitor over there. These are 
hard times ! 

Below it, flung like a carpet on a great smooth 
lawn, lies an Italian garden whose classic taste and 
disposition are amazed at the unexpected ornament of 
a number of huge Tuscan terra-cotta oil-jars, perched 
on stands too small for them, whose decorative fanci- 
fulness harmonizes as ill as may be with the chastened 
harmony of the whole scene. It is a flagrant piece 
of Americanism, as is the arrangement of that row of 
handsome Venetian pozzi, with their polished marble 
kerbs and storied bas-reliefs, at the foot of the ter- 
race. The grace of the flowers that project beyond 
would be so charming any elsewhere than in that 
stiff decoration, so dignified in style and so proudly 
exacting ! 

But the park is admirable, in the rather wilful 
wildness of the broad walks that run down to the 
river. Sometimes, at a turn, an unexpected statue 
rises, like that colossal stone peer in court dress 
whose lordly eye looks down through the green 
boughs upon the embanked valley where the Thames, 
for a moment, assumes the appearance of an Irish 
lake. 



6 

Our electric launch is waiting for us at the landing- 
stage and, a little magically, without smoke, without 
visible effort, almost without noise, takes us to 



THE THAMES 63 

the crowded lock. Numbers of boats jostle one 
another between the lock's green walls. Rows of 
people look down upon us from the banks. Men in 
flannel trousers stand at the head of their punts, pole 
in hand, or, seated in their skiffs, ship their oars and 
with one hand hold on to the chain that hangs along 
the wall, to save the boat from being swept away pres- 
ently, when the lock fills. There is little talking. 
Women are seated among cushions of every kind. 
Behind them, the wicker of a luncheon-basket over- 
laps the seat. Their dress is simple, practical and 
altogether smart. A Frenchwoman in an enormous hat 
and a many-flounced skirt, uttering little cries like a 
terrified owl, would be absurdly out of place here. 
The " good sort " type of woman is not exhilarating, 
but she has her points. And, besides, I must not ex- 
aggerate : there are others. That launch over there 
contains three ladies who are a little painted and 
got-up and who look rather professional. Here, even 
shame bears itself seriously and with conviction : 
these gay persons proclaim something functional and 
implacable in the shade of their dyed hair, the swell- 
ing of their tight-laced forms, the brilliancy of their 
rouge. Observe that these are not hetairae properly 
so-called : no, they fill vague sinecures in the chorus 
of this or that theatre, they know how to behave, 
they have nothing in common with those detestable 
young persons who, in like circumstances in our poor 
country, would not fail to take advantage of this 
promiscuousness to indulge in a thousand vulgar and 
startling jokes ... 



64 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

They are opening the lock. A gentleman tumbles 
into the water. He is fished out, without undue 
alacrity. Drenched, he resumes his boat-hook, with- 
out smiling or accusing anybody. Ye banks of 
Bougival and piers of Poissy, with what shouts and 
oaths would ye not, in a like event, have disturbed 
your spreading fields and your plebeian grass-plots ! 

But see, the water rises, the river's breast lifts, up 
its floating burden, displays its boats and its women 
to the onlookers who line the tow-path. And, as in 
a ballet, one dreams of seeing these serious people 
each carry off his lady-love or loves, as the boats 
rise to the level of the bank, and disappear in the 
fields, his accomplices, at this gentle hour of the 
golden evening. ... 



7 

After dinner, in the bower by the waterside, some- 
one recites Swinburne to the stars. 

Poets, musicians, artists sit and listen, carelessly 
smoking in their wicker chairs, to the ripple of the 
river. The low-roofed house, so pretty and quaint 
with its early- Victorian furniture, forms the back- 
ground of the landscape. The starry night breathes 
none but vague sounds. A distant banjo tinkles on 
the flowery roof of a house-boat anchored in the 
Monkey Island backwater. The frogs will begin to 
croak when it has ceased. And the most wondrous 
piece of word-music that exists, perhaps, in any lan- 
guage, The Garden of Proserpine, sends forth its 



THE THAMES 65 

languid cadences and its Lethean perfumes in the 
listless voice that, little by little, grows weary, 
breaks, fades away and dies : 

From too much love of living, 
From hope and fear set free, 
We thank with brief thanksgiving 
Whatever gods may be 
That no life lives for ever ; 
That dead men rise up never ; 
That even the weariest river 
Winds somewhere safe to sea. 



CHAPTER VII 
COMPARATIVE MANNERS 



The English have been reproached with their lack 
of amiability : they, on their side, accuse us of 
insincerity. Who is right ? I remember a sentence 
of Meredith's in which he speaks of his fellow- 
countrymen, who "are warm somewhere below, as 
chimney-pots are, though they are so stiff." Ex- 
treme amiability lacks dignity in the Saxon's eyes : 
he has no desire to please ; and, in others, it appears 
to him a sort of finical affectation, something effemi- 
nate and inferior. There is a puritanism, a Protestant 
austerity in this attitude. Indeed, this race has no 
need of charm : it possesses strength ; charm con- 
tains an element of seduction and, at the same time, 
of death. The Irish are charming and they are 
perishing. It is a very old law of societies that this 
antagonism of different races ends in the absorption 
of the weak man, of the more advanced and weary 
civihzation (the cultivation of which has become a 
question of snobbish display to the victor) by the 
strong man, the soldier, who, for that matter and by 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS 67 

a just requital, is not long in dying in his turn. This 
is the story of Greece and Rome ; it will perhaps be 
the story of the Latins and the Anglo-Saxons : we 
can practise looking at the Americans with the same 
eye which the pleasure-sated Corinthians turned 
upon the soldiers of Mummius. 

To pay compliments in England is considered 
very " French," very foreign ; they are not in the 
habit of receiving them and their confusion in tliese 
circumstances sometimes rises to the most comical 
pitch, so much so that one is inclined to continue, 
from sheer perversity: and then those clear com- 
plexions colour so pleasingly. At heart, they love 
compliments as much as other people; and the 
women, who are but little spoilt in this respect, soon 
acquire a taste for them. 

The Englishman is formal, the German cere- 
monious, the Frenchman polite (or, at least, he was 
so before he became depraved by the barbarous prin- 
ciple of equality). Two Frenchmen meeting each 
other will exchange a grip of the hand which the 
Englishman deems superfluous ; two Germans, 
though they have been intimately acquainted for 
thirty years, will bow to the ground. But what is 
all this beside the refinement of the Chinese, among 
whom each speaker disparages himself in order to 
exalt the other, where, should one ask, " How are 
your illustrious consort and your flourishing off- 
spring ? " the other is bound to answer in such 
words as, ''The unspeakable hulk that serves me 
as a mattress and her verminous litter are, I 



68 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

thank you, in the enjoyment of a regrettable good- 
health." 

A formidable experience, which I will not wish 
my enemy, is to kiss the hand of an Englishwoman. 
This is not generally done and one sees young 
hobbledehoys shake venerable grandmothers like 
plum-trees, without a qualm, I am supposing that, 
one day, you want to give a proof of good manners, 
or, simply, that you recoil from the brutality of dis- 
jointing a dowager. You take the hand held out to 
you and raise it lightly, bowing the while ; a resist- 
ing force stops you : what is passing through the 
lady's mind ? A tumult of thoughts, no doubt : 
** What is this Frenchman going to do ? . . . Those 
people are capable of anything. . . . There's some- 
one looking. ... I won't let him. . . ." All this 
passes " in less time than it takes," etc. Suddenly, 
an illuminating idea : "I believe it's done on the 
Continent." The resistance ceases abruptly, the 
hand flies upwards and you receive a violent bang 
on the nose. You usually finish the evening under 
the pump. 



Have you read The Visits of Elizabeth? Let 
me present to you a young lady still greatly in 
vogue in England. Imagine an Agn^s up-to-date, 
an English girl of seventeen, travelling with her 
maid and, in the course of a series of visits to 
different country-houses in England and France, 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS 69 

sending her impressions to her mother by letter. 
The collected letters form a volume, a little rogue 
of a book which is anything but tedious and which 
has delighted our neighbours. 

Elizabeth talks of everything, but with a disarm- 
ing candour and an intentness upon " putting her 
foot in it " which we end by suspecting, not, how- 
ever, before the author has obtained some very 
enlivening effects from it. She is a Mile. Loulou 
with a touch of the minx about her, a strong tinge 
of snobbery and an archness that is more essentially 
feminine than that of Gyp's heroine. She seems 
remarkably destitute of native kindness. But she 
lives, rattles and gossips in a fairly documentary 
way. 

Her success in England is due to the fact that 
she shows smart people in equivocal or unpleasant 
predicaments. This causes the most undiluted joy 
to the middle classes. When it concerns their own 
aristocracy, of whom they are proud, they feel a 
discreet mirth, enlivened by flattered curiosity : 
they feel that they are admitted to the Holy of 
Holies; they listen at the doors of fashion and 
breathe its atmosphere. When another aristocracy 
is concerned, the French, for instance, of whom 
Elizabeth gives us some sketches that are much 
funnier even than she thinks, then the good public 
unbuttons its waistcoat and laughs loudly, with no 
restraining scruples. 

English snobbery ! We do not conceive how 
massive, how substantial, let me say how constitu- 



70 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

tional it is. It differs from every other kind. In a 
country governed by an absolute monarchy, it is 
only natural that the magic spell attaching to divine 
right should overflow from the throne to the steps 
on which its chief defenders stand crowded. This 
is the old, good snobbery, in any case the most easy 
to understand, the snobbery of the Marechal de La 
Feuillade and the Due de Saint-Simon. 

To the Americans, the " quality," as people used 
to say in the eighteenth century, represents a luxury 
in which they can afford to indulge in the form of 
sons-in-law : with them, snobbery assumes a quite 
different character. 

In France, a few cases of atavism keep alive the 
snobbery of the grand period, even as the peaceful 
angler displays the survival of the predatory instinct 
in man. We have the illustrious example of the 
noble lord so wonderfully well-versed in pedigrees, 
who, having fallen into the lake of Geneva, one day, 

with his cousin the Duchesse de D , made her 

dive in again just as she had reached a life-buoy, 
exclaiming : 

" The elder branch first ! " 

O admirable phrase ! But these are only excep- 
tions. Thanks to equality, that precious conquest of 
the Revolution, our latter-day snobbery is embellished 
with hatred and ill-will, is tinted with envy and 
contempt. 

But, in England, the thing is very different. This 
sentiment seems only very paradoxically compatible 
with their fine notions of human dignity and individ- 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS 71 

ual liberty ; but, if you look into it more closely, it 
is but the rather absurd reflex of eternal human 
vanity on the perfectly-hierarchized working of an 
excellent social machine. In any case, they have 
this respect and worship of birth in their blood. It 
bursts through every line of Thackeray, a shrewd 
satirist if ever one was, but one whose lash is re- 
strained by an inevitable deference : Beaumarchais 
wields his with a very different sort of passion. 
And one discovers, with surprise, the same leaven 
of reverence even in the works of an artist of the 
stature of George Meredith ! 

You can well imagine that our little minx of an 
Elizabeth leaves nothing to be wished for in this 
respect. Her historiographer informs us ruthlessly, 
on the second line of page one, that the ancestors of 
this adorable ingenue go back to the Conquest and 
that she numbers at least two countesses and a 
duchess among her relatives. She ends by marrying 
a marquess whose acquaintance she makes at her 
very first visit in the following manner (I propose 
to pick a few episodes in the book, at random 
among those which are most instructive as to the 
environments described or the mischievous powers 
of observation of the fair letter-writer): Elizabeth 
has just arrived at Nazeby Hall, the country-house 
of a certain Lady Cecilia, a prominent member of 
the Upper Ten Thousand, for a cricket-week (a 
form of entertainment from which I pray Heaven 
to preserve you for many a long day). Her first 
blunder consists in proclaiming aloud that the house 



72 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

is haunted (in England, many a self-respecting 
country-house possesses a ghost), that they are 
trying to keep it from her, but that she distinctly 
saw a grey figure disappear round the bend of 
the hall the other night and so on. This makes 
several persons turn cold, but has a singularly 
exciting effect upon the Marquess of Valmond, who, 
that same evening, on the terrace, puts his arm 
round Elizabeth's waist, kisses her and proposes 
that he shall come and play the ghost to her. 
Elizabeth, in a rage, slaps his face, for she is a 
virtuous young person. She and Valmond, he still 
carrying the great red finger-marks on his cheek, 
go back to the drawing-room, where a certain Mrs. 
Smith, concerning whom it is easy to guess the 
bonds that unite her to the marquess, says, in a loud 
voice : 

" It looks, Harry, as if our sweet Elizabeth had 
boxed your ears." 

To which the simple girl replies (for she does not 
love Mrs. Smith) : 

" It is perfectly true, and I will box your ears if 
you call me ' Elizabeth * again ! " 

I do not know if you seize the perfume of ex- 
quisite refinement exhaled by this little scene of 
country-house life in the upper circles of British 
society. 

This, therefore, according to our heroine, is the 
tone of the smart set, the fast set, of people " in the 
movement." It is explained by the fact that it con- 
stitutes a reaction against the tone of the old aristo- 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS 73 

crac}'' of the worn-out type (what we in Paris would 
call " the old Faubourg ") and also against that of 
the middle classes, two terrible centres of respecta- 
bility and boredom which justify every excess. Our 
heroine passes through these too, first at Aunt 
Mary's, 300 Eaton Place, next at Heaviland Manor 
and, lastly, at Carriston Towers, the historic abode 
of people whom one guesses to belong to a tremen- 
dously lordly set : dukes, members of parliament, a 
cousin who is a curate (and whom, by the way, 
Elizabeth catches kissing a mature damsel in the 
aviary) ; the men talk politics and pheasants, the 
women High Church or the Anti-Romanist League. 
Elizabeth, delighted at heart, because she feels 
that all this, however boring, is still very safe, 
very solid in the matter of fashion, is glad, for all 
that, to return to surroundings better suited to her 
style of beauty and more like those in which we 
have already seen her. We find her at Hazeldene 
Court, at Lord Westaway's, whose eldest son 
has married an ex-actress, to the great sorrow of 
Lady Westaway, who, nevertheless, scares her 
daughter-in-law. There is a horse-show, to which 
Lord Bobby Pomeroy has brought some horses and 
his wife. Lady Bobby, who is a woman of principle, 
would not have come, only that Bobby insisted, as 
he was showing his horses and it was convenient ; 
but she never comes out of her room, from which 
she amuses herself by shooting at rabbits just 
beyond the wire fence of the lawn. Charming, is 
it not ? 



74 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Then we have Chevenix Castle, a very modern 
house, where South-African miUionaires provide 
the wives of accommodating and needy peers with 
pearls and where other exceedingly well-born people 
play the part of bear-leader to a family of parvenus. 
Elizabeth asks some one what the expression 
" running people " means and is told in these in- 
genuous words : 

" It's being put on to things in the City and 
having all your bills paid if you introduce them to 
people. It is quite a profession now and done by 
the best people." 

Lastly, Foljambe Place, with very rich and snob- 
bish Jews : expensive ornaments, gold plate, Louis 
XV and Louis XVI furniture, Tziganes, Aubusson 
tapestry. Lord Valmond invites himself (in order 
to see Elizabeth) to the great delight of the hostess, 
who at once proposes to turn old Lord Oldfield out 
of his room — which is the best in the bachelors' 
suite — as he is only a baron (a trifle !). This woman 
of taste gushes at Valmond all the more as he is 
said to be " ridiculously old-fashioned and particular 
and actually in London won't go to places unless he 
knows the host and hostess personally" (sic). 

It is here, at Foljambe Place, under this auspicious 
roof, that the captivating marquess proposes and wins 
the hand of the heroine ; and we must all regret the 
omission of the letter which this incorrigible ingenue 
is bound to have sent to her mother on the day after 
the wedding. 

The most interesting part of the book, from my 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS 75 

point of view, is, of course, that which describes 
Elizabeth's stay in France. She has lived in Cannes 
before that and is supposed to know foreign ways. 
The insular qualities allotted to her (deliberately, 
I am sure, for otherwise they would be too funny) 
derive from this fact a still more diverting character. 

Two things generally prevent the English from 
knowing what French life means : first, their own 
lack of curiosity, made up, in equal shares, of a 
certain mental inertia and a feeling of condescend- 
ing and contemptuous superiority ; and, secondly, 
our natural reserve towards foreigners, who have so 
few opportunities of taking part in our home life and 
in whom the word "France" arouses, according to 
their bringing up, associations only of the stage, 
the kitchen or lower still. 

This reserve, which goes as far as inhospitality 
(the author oi Eve victorieuse very justly places this 
last accusation against the French in the mouth of 
an American woman), has as its excuse our stay-at- 
home humour, to which travel, exile seem the worst 
and most suspicious of calamities : do we not, in our 
prayers, call upon the Lord in one breath on behalf 
of " travellers, the sick and the dying ? " It is, 
nevertheless, one of the least attractive features of 
our national temperament. The love of saving is 
another. 

Now it so happens that Elizabeth, through her 
godmother, is received in good French houses, goes 
about with French people, assists at the arranging 
of a wedding, at a rallie-papier, at a cotillon. She 



76 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

obviously has not the same sort of observing-appa- 
ratus as a Taine or a Chevrillon and her generaliza- 
tions are sometimes inclined to be disconcerting. 
No matter, she makes a very good average, her im- 
pressions tell : she has seen the surface of things, 
like everybody, and that is much. 

Well, French life, as reflected in this young mind> 
is really curious, strange and new. It assuriies 
the appearance of a circus-parade, where fantastic 
characters with familiar names, made up accord- 
ing to well-known memories, behave in a manner 
which one seems to recognize. Elizabeth may con- 
sider herself sufficiently rewarded by the favour of 
the English public for having succeeded in recon- 
ciling with venerable tricks of wit and raillery the 
French types that emerge from these little carica- 
tures, sketched on the spot, of which a pretence of 
deceptive authenticity enhances the irony, an irony 
ever careful not to shock our traditional methods of 
laughter. 

The very language of these worthies (for they 
talk French) reminds one of the circus, of 
the clown's slang. One notices such phrases 
as, "// ne faut pas que madame la baronne reste 
trop longtemps se mouillant les pieds" and that 
ces messieurs would have to be tres bourgeois (for 
^' pas dtfficiles^^) en voyage. The heroine, who has 
attracted the admiration of another's fianc^, is ad- 
dressed as *' Petite embrouillante d'heureuses families ^ 

Most of the phrases, in themselves marked by a 
rich exoticism, are placed in the mouth of an amazing 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS] 77 

man-servant, who answers to the name of Hippolyte 
and who is the incarnation of the type of old re- 
tainer of French tradition : familiar, cross-grained 
at times, but faithful as a spaniel, with a serf's devo- 
tion for the lord on whose land his ancestors have 
toiled. This type of Caleb, suppressed by our 
modern manners and replaced by the triumphant 
larbin^ who robs his master and votes against him, 
a pure democratic conquest, whose jealous and per- 
fervid eye reads the Declaration of the Rights of Man 
at the bottom of every vessel which it is his business 
to empty, this type might be interesting to set down. 
Now Hippolyte, the Baronne de Larnac's devoted 
mattre d^hotel, is the prize ape of the provincial 
menagerie to which Miss Elizabeth takes us. He 
has a face like a baboon, with side-whiskers and the 
rest blue from shaving. His mistress uses him as a 
cook and a lady's maid and says that she could not 
live without him. This is how he speaks to 
her : they are on board the yacht ; the baroness is 
frightened and screams ; suddenly, Hippolyte pops 
his head out of the cabin and says : 

" Pas de danger ! Et il ne faut pas que madame la 
baronne fasse la be'bete ! " 

Another time, still on board the yacht, he explains 
all the places they pass through, always ending with 
this charming sentence : 

" // ne faut pas que madame la baronne pionce" 

Observe that we are in the best society, in the 
country, in Normandy, in a very good set. If 
Elizabeth is at once struck by the fact that the 



78 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

women are not in evening-dress at dinner, she also 
notices the liveries " buttoned up to the throat," the 
white cotton gloves of the men-servants and the 
service a lafran^aise (including even the simplicity 
of a dish-warmer in the middle of the table), which 
has almost completely gone out of our customs and 
which is found, only very rarely, in patriarchal bourses 
and, perhaps, among a few Jews noted for their 
accomplished social pretensions. 

I am perfectly convinced that our fair traveller 
met and heard Hippolyte. She could tell me where 
to find him, at a pinch. And yet he belongs to a 
truthfulness that is superior to art, he goes beyond 
fiction, he bursts the narrow conception of a type. 
He is too fine, too unique. His one mistake is that 
he is presented as a synthetic fact. One obtains the 
impression that all French servants exceed all bounds 
in their familiarity. The ostler of an inn, in another 
chapter, says to the noble excursionists : 

" Je dis ce que je dis ef je men fiche pas mal ! " 

The rest is of a piece with this. 

Many other details arouse Elizabeth's critical 
spirit. The general conversation at table astonishes 
her as an excess of sociability. In England, 
people just talk to their neighbours. She thinks 
the French witty, but cannot get used to their 
way of eating, which she can't bear, especially in the 
members of very old families, who are the worst. 
No doubt, we have all seen ancestors use their rins- 
ing-glasses with etymological strictness after their 
meals ; but this care for health and cleanliness was 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS 79 

respectable in intention, if not in form, and serves 
once more to illustrate this great truth, that nothing 
more closely resembles dirtiness than extreme 
cleanliness. 

As for cleanliness, we all know that the English 
invented it. What am I saying ? They have mono- 
polized it, they have made of it an essentially national, 
inalienable virtue, a rite, an arcanum, more or less, 
as they have of sport. The enormous vogue of 
Daudet's Tartarin series across the Channel is due 
only to the caricature of the " sporting instincts " of 
the boasting Latins (cap-hunts, chamois-hunts, lion- 
hunts, explorers' humbug and so on). In the same 
way, jokes about baths and washing, as conceived by 
the feeble intellects of other nations, form a serious 
ground-work to Anglo-Saxon humour. The poor 
Boers, among others, had to pay for the success of 
their arms by countless quips at the infrequency of 
their change of linen. 

I need hardly tell you that France has come off no 
better than the others. Elizabeth's visitation does 
not spare us on this head. We read, " It appears 
you don't wash much till you are married ; " else- 
where, the _heroine has a row with her godmother 
for taking a bath (in the bath=room) " toute nue " (as 
a matter of fact, we have all known old ladies with 
these strict views, but this one seems to have been 
the amie of an Englishman, Elizabeth's own father, 
as our heroine discreetly hints) ; another time, she 
writes, after the viscount has proposed for her hand,? 
"Just as if I would dream of marrying into a nations 



So THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

that eats badly and doesn't have a bath except to be 
smart." And, many more times yet, the implacable 
child observes the shortcomings of our domestic 
hygiene with that strongly-marked tone of petty 
Pharisaism , . . Oh, little white sepulchre, whitened 
in London ! . . . 

In a less special order of ideas, Ehzabeth indulges 
in observations no less interesting. Very curious 
are her impressions of the marriage of Victorine, an 
ugly heiress who receives love-letters from her 
music-master, with a marquis involved in pressing 
debts. The marquis, has, of course, conceived a 
violent passion for Elizabeth, like the viscount and 
most of the other male persons of this impetuous 
soil. She drives them to despair, as is right and 
proper. Their hair is cut en brosse. They put their 
heels together when they bow. But, of course, one 
couldn't marry a Frenchman anyway. 

Meantime, she waits in a cab at the bottom of the 
steps of the Madeleine, where her married friend 
Hdo'Ise has an assignation, on the pretext of going 
to confession, with a young officer ; she discovers 
that gastronomical wonder, gooseberry-syrup; she 
** does a lot of churches " while passing through 
Rouen and reveals her artistic level in two lines 
when she declares that churches always look to her 
just the same and, any way, they all smell alike (it 
is true that she might have read Ruskin and that 
would have been worse) ; she hears the ill-spoken 
ostler in the inn at Vernon, whom I quoted just now, 
refuse to admit for a moment that the Comtesse de 



COMPARATIVE MANNERS 8i 

Tournelle has shared her husband's room and persist 
in calling her " la petite demoiselle blonde dans la 
chambre de monsieur le comte " before all the other 
travellers, whereupon one of them says " that it 
served them perfectly right, that he had warned them 
. that their reputations would suffer if husbands and 
wives camped together." One would be sorry to 
disturb so racy an idea of French marriage : it is too 
admirably adapted for the irony of our neighbours. 
As one finishes the book, one might easily be 
tempted to indulge in melancholy. Are men then 
condemned to make up for their ignorance of one 
another's deeds and minds only by misunderstand- 
ings ? No, let us not be weak enough to judge like 
this. Let us invite Elizabeth again. She carries a 
neat little scalpel in the handle of her fan. What 
matter if she sometimes blunders in its use ? How 
right she is to see the grotesque absurdity of the 
condition of the young girl in France, of marriage as 
we conclude it and even of our horror of draughts ! 
Let her bring her husband with her, him who is put 
in his place by his fianc6e for saying of the French, 
" The Frenchwomen aren't bad, but the men are 
monkeys." We will give him a day with the hounds 
in the Ile-de-France, among proper people ; we will 
show him a carrousel at Saumur, for instance, a little 
aerostation and other things of that kind which he 
will be able to understand. There are a few left. 
Boni might get up a little entertainment in the Ile- 
du-Bois for him, who knows ? : . . As for Elizabeth, 
who has natural intelligence, we shall find a thousand 

F 



82 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

ways of amusing her : the Od6on, the Institute, the 
Cabaret du Neant, an evening at Madame de Saint 
Jacques'. ... 

Thus supplied with documents, in the enjoyment 
of her intuitions as a grown woman, learning through 
these experiences how unspeakably exquisite, essen- 
tial and fascinating are the several factors that go 
to make up the inimitable charm of Paris life (at 
least, the Parisians have always said so and there 
remain a few negroes who hold this opinion), let her 
resume that delightful pen which was at once so kind 
to us and so cruel. We shall no longer . fear its 
decrees. 



CHAPTER VIII 

HENLEY— ALDERSHOT— HAMPSHIRE— THE 
POOL OF LONDON 



On three days of every year, the smiling valley in 
which the village of Henley displays its clustering 
houses and the Norman tower of its church, beside 
the soft-flowing stream, is filled with clamour, with 
flower-decked boats, with women in light dresses : 
quite a festival. We are gathered to see young men, 
in incredible skiffs, long and narrow as swords, 
struggle to pass one another by dipping into the 
water long implements of wood flattened at the end. 
Deafening cheers accompany this exertion. The 
reward of the victors consists of metal cups of most 
distressing workmanship. The rowers have pre- 
pared themselves for the ordeal by a month's train- 
ing, during which they have lived on grilled and 
carefully-weighed meats, walked the same number 
of steps daily, gone to bed nightly at ten o'clock and 
observed the strictest continence. Some of them 
have come from very far, from across the Atlantic : 
they carry the destinies of a great people and their 



84 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

fellow-countrymen make themselves known in the 
crowd by their self-assertive twang. There is also 
a Protestant missionary and paterfamilias who 
measures himself against the son of a brewer and 
peer of the realm in a match, which is the great 
attraction of the day. Such is " the first regatta in 
the world." 

Sport supplies ample materials for philosophy. 
" M. Prudhomme " would bewail so much wasted 
energy. Peaceable mortals will congratulate them- 
selves on seeing the old fighting instinct, which used 
to arm men one against the other, thus modified and 
diverted. The traveller in this island will necessarily 
see here a fine lavishness of strength and activity. 
The Anglo-Saxon race is rich enough in vigour to 
expend it recklessly; and this animal life is a power- 
ful counterpoise to thought, almost a means of 
government, seeing that the people is enamoured of 
it. The Byzantine emperors, who fostered the rival- 
ries of the circus, knew this as well as Mr. Balfour, 
who recently made a speech extolling athleticism. 
And he spoke with justice. If the English had more 
taste, they would, through the cult of this beautiful 
spiritual and physical harmony, be the equals of the 
Greeks. But it must be observed that modern sport 
is not sufficiently dignified by a preoccupying love of 
beauty. Without this, it becomes silly, owing to the 
want of proportion between the aim and the effort, 
and ridiculous when no danger comes to whet its 
charm. 

The waning sun envelops this motley crowd, 



HENLEY 85 

which differs from our sombre crowds because of 
the pink and blue blazers of the rival crews and the 
white straw hats and the gay frocks of the ladies ; 
on the roofs of the house-boats, the china tea-things 
are scattered among the floral phantasies; one 
hardly sees the water, laden with a compact flotilla ; 
amid the popping of champagne-corks, minstrels 
in Venetian dominoes pass and sing along the 
launches; the warm and hazy light of this Con- 
stable evening fills the valley, gilds with its faithful 
rays this vision of easy, elegant and adorned 
existence; and we can look forward to a night of 
maddened policemen, of extinguished street-lamps, 
of furious singing, of wild rushing through the 
streets : the training is over, all abstinence at an 
end, victors and vanquished are drunk as lords. 



Aldershot is the EngUsh Chalons. I here meet 

again, as a general, Colonel T , who used to be 

military attache at Paris and whose election to the 
Jockey Club was for a moment in doubt because of 
his ancestor's differences with Joan of Arc. It was 
Baron Alphonse who started this hare : the others 
had forgotten all about it. Thanks to the general's 
kindness, I attend the review and, on the other 
hand, courteous officers hasten to do the honours of 
English military hfe to one who has followed their 
profession in his own country. 

Of the personality of the soldier as we understand 



86 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

it (I mean the professional soldier, the officer), be- 
tween the strict discipline which continually and 
indefatigably brings the subaltern under his com- 
manding officer and that compulsorily herded Hfe 
which we adorn with the name of " comradeship " 
(a deceptive paradox, seeing that promotion, the 
good soldier's only dream, is based upon mortality !), 
not much remains. That constant regard for the 
separate entity which distinguishes British civilization 
is repeated in their military organization. Each man's 
individuality is safeguarded. Habeas corpus is the 
fundamental principle, notwithstanding the contra- 
dictions of a retrogressive system of legislation. 
All England's greatness lies in this. In France, the 
ideal seems to be to reduce the individual to the 
colourless, but resigned abstraction of a distinguish- 
ing number. Not so here. Apart from questions 
of principle, there is an utilitarian idea at stake : 
else recruiting would be impossible. Tommy Atkins, 
the Enghsh " Dumanet," is well treated, well fed, 
well paid : the army in this island is at the same 
time the sacred guardian of the public liberties and 
the necessary depository of the social refuse. An 
admirably-conceived conjunction ! It has its draw- 
backs : if Tommy has the right to adorn the head of 
his bed with the photographs of his friends, to make 
himself a little home in the mess-room, he believes 
also that he has the right of protesting against 
abuses. Hence those frequent mutinies, which a 
Frenchman, who is soon subdued, fails to under- 
stand. A soldier who remains a free man goes 



ALDERSHOT 87 

beyond our intelligence. And yet how logical it 
would be to think in this way on that soil each 
of whose children owes the formidable impost of 
his blood at times and of his liberty at all times ! 
A national guard, such, in substance and in fact, 
is our army ; the term, with us, ought to be regarded 
not as one of disparagement, but as an ideal. 

From the point of view of comfort, what would 
you say, " dear comrades " of yester-year, you who 
remember Mourmelon, the ignominy of its quarters, 
the horror of its low "gaffs," the dismal foliage of 
"Wood B 3," if you could gaze upon the shady 
park, ever gay with military bands, where His 
Gracious Majesty's officers come to spend in cricket 
or tennis-matches the abundant leisure which the 
service leaves them ! And you, frequenters of the 
squalid pensions where unemployed combative- 
ness and hopeless dyspepsia grate mercilessly 
together and of the "military clubs," those dreary 
back-rooms of provincial coffee-houses, where, be- 
hind the partition of the commercial room, one hears 
the click of the redoubtable dominoes — " It's your 
down 1 "—what would all of you think, if you 
could be present at the weekly guest-dinner of the 
different messes, with their supplies of rare wines 
and gold and silver plate ! . . . 

From the picturesque point of view, this army is 
admirable ; one of these days, no doubt, the deco- 
rative mission will be the only one left for armies to 
fulfil. They make an eloquent appeal to the nigger 
that is in each of us, with the brilliancy of their 



88 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

uniforms and the brass of their bands. I have known 
a number of emotions, some of them quite sublime, 
roused by the shrill and mighty incantation of the 
fifes. Certain regiments have symbolic animals — 
the Seaforth Highlanders a deer, others a goat — 
which march at their head on parade, a sort of 
fetiches, of living, petted and august standards. It 
is a great mistake to leave a cult in the abstract. 
This is true from the religious point of view, too : 
the Bible is here as essential a portion of each 
man's kit as the soap and the button-stick. 



3 
Here, in Hampshire, is the real English country : 
green, wooded, with fine trees, pleasant villages on 
grass-girt rivers, a look of comfort and security- 
One feels here respect for the past, content with the 
present, confidence in the future. A glorious forest, 
planted by William Rufus, spreads shades that are 
never touched over moss and ferns. Here, the 
melancholy Jacques of As You Like It dreams, 
leaning against an oak ; soon, in the footpath, you 
shall hear the steps of Rosalind. . . . Further stands 
a country-house, the seat of the late Lord Palmerston, 
full of very fine Italian and English pictures, among 
which I notice a portrait by Lely, the Court painter 
of Charles II., representing the Duchess of Ports- 
mouth, the fair Keroualle, the little Breton of 
middling good family, whose Chinese eyes and too- 
tall forehead must have stirred the fancy of a king 



THE POOL OF LONDON 89 

surfeited with other beauties, cold and stiff as a 
garden by Le Notre, devoid of surprise or mystery. 



4 

The next morning, I find myself transferred from 
this pastoral scene to the heart of demoniacal 
London and nothing could be more striking than 
the contrast between the England which one sees 
from the Hampshire hills and that which speeds 
before our eyes on either bank of the Thames, 
between London Bridge and Woolwich. The murky 
water is laden with ships and flows between docks 
blackened with coal and filled with the sound of 
machinery. From time to time, a monument as 
black as the fronts of the noisy factories makes a 
fantastic appearance in the fog, such as that gigantic 
bridge whose bascules open like a pair of jaws and 
whose twin towers are connected by a giddy footway 
reached by means of lifts. 

There is in all this a moving and mysterious 
beauty. It rises imperiously out of these things 
which were not made to be beautiful ; and therein 
lies its wonder. It is the new beauty, the poem of 
eternal effort and indomitable energy, which is sung 
by the groaning engines and the chink of the gold 
on the counters. Those merchants and those work- 
men collaborate dimly and unconsciously to produce 
the emotions of the inspired singer who will one day 
describe them to themselves. The least human 
action is fraught with millions of destinies. 



go THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

There is a philosopher on board who is a politician 
too and for whom M. Brunetiere wrote a preface, Mr. 
Balfour : a charming man, for the rest, and wholly 
intent upon the technicalities of the occasion. For 
we are on an interesting vessel : Lord Charles 
Beresford is doing the honours of one of the gun- 
boats specially and reciently built for service on the 
Nile. The word gun-boat is too modest : she is 
more like a man-of-war, with her Maxim guns 
behind steel plates of extraordinary thickness ; room 
for a hundred rifles in addition to the guns ; drawing 
two feet only of water, an ingenious and, I belipve, 
new arrangement thanks to which the^screws, 
sheltered in a sort of hollow tunnel's in the hull, are 
protected against injuries from the enemy's fire or 
from rocks : all this constitutes a formidable engine 
of war. 

Here are the Babelish docks: they stretch out 
innnitely their basins, their sheds, their warehouses 
open to receive the tribute of the globe. Here is 
Greenwich Hospital, a famous old palace equal to 
our Invalides. One's heart beats with the most 
poignant emotions of adventure and death before 
the relics of the Franklin expedition ; and no poet, 
perhaps, will ever equal the romantic and tragic 
beauty of the few lines, in faded ink, which are here 
exhibited: the codicil which Nelson added to his 
will, on the morning of Trafalgar, recommending 
the mistress whom he loved to his people and his 
king. 

The gun-boat glides swiftly over the sluggish 



THE POOL OF LONDON 91 

water. Soon her flat plates will be creaking on the 
sand-banks of old Nile, her stem will be set towards 
the fabled heart of the last of the world's unknown 
continents. She carries two men mindful of that 
destiny, each in his own way, who are numbered 
among the most representative of their race : a 
famous sailor, an eminent statesman, action and 
thought, brought together by an unanimous work. 
The distant mass of the docks, the classic front of 
Greenwich, the present and the past respectively 
greet the vigorous future and their sons who 
guide it. 

To feel so close at hand, so active, so at one those 
forces which unite and exalt a nation gives a fine 
thrill of life, of multiple life, expanding beyond the 
limits of the individual consciousness. An entire 
race aims at taking cognizance of itself in the spirit 
in which, for a moment, it reflects the sights and 
spells of its greatness. It is a sensation of beauty 
and one of the loftiest : it reveals to us the same joys 
before the bold and rhythmical play of a beautiful 
social organism as before a beautiful form, a beauti- 
ful statue, or any other happy and harmonious 
result of life ; it causes us to be moved by the justice 
of a charter or a law as by the curve or the power 
of a muscle ; and it impresses on our memory the 
achievement of a race in the history of the world with 
the same eloquence as does, on the frontal of a 
temple, the grace of an heroic or divine marble. 



CHAPTER IX 

ALONG THE SOUTH COAST—A VISIT TO 
RUDYARD KIPLING 



Brighton, London-by-the-Sea, is nothing less than 
smart at this season : a great unpacking of counter- 
jumpers and their girls ; all the back-shops of the 
East End discharging their overflow on a beach 
crowded with couples sprawling in attitudes which 
would shock our modest sergents-de-ville, but which 
here alarm nobody. Yet we are at but two steps 
from an outdoor sermon, marked by the bleating of 
a portable organ and, on a board, this perplexing 
question : 

" What would Jesus do ? " 



Ryde, in the Isle of Wight, is one of the prettiest 
nooks of English nature conceivable. We have come 
on a cruise in the Solent and, in this dazzling summer, 
the intoxication of scudding along these verdant 
coasts is greater still. The yacht lists, the water 



ALONG THE SOUTH COAST 93 

foams. Here is Osborne, the princely residence to 
which every August used to bring " Auntie," as the 
good people of the island called their late queen, and, 
next, spreading its lawns down to the very waves, a 
nobleman's seat, a proud mansion standing between 
trees three centuries old and the eternal waves, 
evoking an ideal of aristocratic life, a security of 
moral dignity and tradition which the land of 
M. Mesureur no longer knows. 



Cowes, the yachting capital, is in buzzing activity 
and this population, living entirely on the whim of 
millionaires who like to see their melancholy housed 
in a floating kennel, moves about under the anxious 
eye of the owners. 

Here are the racing-yachts, the yearlings of this 
season ; for under the caps of the different yacht-clubs 
is elaborated, year by year, a more absurd and more 
delusive model than the last. Yachting is a sport of 
the most absolute uselessness. It is all the nobler 
and the more touching therefore. This childish pur- 
suit of speed is obtained at the cost of everything, 
especially of comfort. The deck is generally three 
parts under water, a condition of things unfavourable 
to meditation. They talk of a reaction against un- 
practical models ; but can we believe in it ? I prefer 
to think that we shall long continue to see those 
mad, graceful butterflies skim over the emerald 
Solent : mariners are too charming people and, Hke 



94 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the poets, too closely allied to the moon, under which 
they too were born, to be ever ridiculous. 

At night, we dine overlooking the sea. We talk 
of Paris ; of Marienbad, where the Due d'Orleans has 
lost six kilogrammes of our fondest hopes and am- 
bitions : of other trifles. 



4 
Exile was sweet to me on your green shores, O 
Sea View and little harbours strewn along the coasts, 
with your inevitable piers on which three gentlemen 
play things (sacred music on Sundays) ; your little 
hotels, smelling of ship-board, where the lunchepn- 
gong summons the sun-burnt, lithe, flannelled young 
men to the side of the lady of mature age, ever the 
same, decked out in a thousand celluloid ornaments ; 
your peaceful esplanades, where the idleness of the 
strollers, across the smoke from their pipes, diverts 
that constant watchfulness which marks a well-armed 
race to the ever new and moving life of the offing. 
Here one inhales the fragrance of flowers, ozone and 
confident souls. Assuredly the ease and harmony 
of English life spring from the adequacy of these 
men to their country. Neither this nature nor its 
sons tell their secret : doubtless, they have none, 
considering that it is enough to be handsome, strong, 
rich and happy. 



A VISIT TO RUDYARD KIPLING 95 



5 

In a nook on the south coast, near Brighton, 
at the end of a creek that should lend itself to the 
smugglers' needs, a village crowds around a flint 
church. Less commonplace than the ordinary 
English village, it looks cross and crabbed and 
presents an almost Breton picturesqueness. Opposite 
the church-yard, hidden among the trees of its garden, 
stands the house, the watch-tower whence England's 
sentry gives voice. Presently, as he sees me to the 
door, Mr. Kipling, alluding to my friendship with the 
Anatolian smugglers, of which I have been boasting, 
will remind me that Rottingdean is built on a cliff 
riddled with caves and hiding-places, which, for 
centuries, concealed the plunder, while the tarred 
corpses swung in chains to the sea-winds. 

A classic parlour-maid shows me in. Some one 
is just scrambling off a sofa : Mr. Kipling stands 
before me. He welcomes me charmingly, eagerly : 

"Tea?" 

Tea. A hostess of so perfect a distinction that 
one dare not insist upon it, for fear of displeasing her, 
presides over this rite of English life. Like many 
Americans, Mrs. Kipling has a very young face and 
hair that is turning grey. She likes to recall her 
French origin, to which her maiden name bears 
witness. 

He, the poet, does not look more than thirty. 
Nicholson's print makes him seem older than he is. 



96 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Collier's portrait alone gives the frank, open and 
youthful expression of the original. His eyes, in 
particular, hold the attention, behind the immovable 
glasses, full of light, sympathy and gaiety, thirst- 
ing to reflect life in all its forms. The chestnut 
hair is cut straight over the forehead. The thickset 
and rather plump figure possesses a singular agility, 
with none of the somewhat wooden gestures of the 
average Englishman. 

Seated now behind his writing-table, his elbows 
resting on small sheets covered with tiny lines of 
manuscript, he waves his intelligent hands, with 
their firm wrists, covered with short hairs, and at 
times throws himself back with a boyish laugh. 
For this much-honoured and famous man, in whom 
all the dim consciousness of a grateful race now first 
finds its expression, is simplicity personified. 

A portrait of Burne- Jones hangs upon the wall. 
The painter, who was a relation by marriage of the 
poet, used, if I be not mistaken, to live in this same 
house, this little dwelling large enough to contain 
two such different conceptions of art, one aristo- 
cratic, suffering, bewailing from the top of its tower 
of ivory 

Un amour taciturne et toujours menac6 ; 

the other bold, free from scornful prejudice, refusing 
to believe that beauty lags behind truth, impatient 
to weld together their conquests and to resolve their 
apparent discords into new harmonies. 

We speak first of India. Mr. Kipling has a 



A VISIT TO RUDYARD KIPLING 97 

lingering affection for that " grim step-mother of 
our kind." Brought up in the manner 'of all 
Anglo-Indian children, he speaks Hindustani with 
such perfection as is possible in this sort of 
Volapiik, derived from Sanskrit, which serves as 
a master-key to the 270 idioms spoken between 
the Himalayas and Cape Kumarin. He declares 
that he even thinks and dreams in Hindustani. . . . 
But he knows Northern India best. He smiles 
when I tell him that I have heard him accused, 
in the southern presidencies, of northern pre- 
judices. 

" I like the Russians too," he says, " with the 
same feeling of sympathy that draws me towards 
the oriental. They are so oriental 1 Look at 
Tolstoi ! He's a fakir. That longing to push his 
ideas to their ultimate catastrophe is just like the 
Hindu ascetic. He do6s his procreative duty and 
then curses the flesh and retires into solitude. 
Down to his curse upon art ! " — and here Mr. Kip- 
ling finds an opportunity to confess that he does not 
care for Wagner, that he likes Bach a little, Gounod 
entirely, that he hates Beethoven, but adores Offen- 
bach — "Now the Hindu has passed beyond the 
artistic phase, the phase of material realizations, and 
is at the metaphysical phase." 

Mr. Kipling is right. People to whom all shapes 
are daughters of illusion and the unconscious must 
lack the necessary ground-work for an aesthetic 
system. In the immense range of Sanskrit litera- 
ture, there is not, I think, a single treatise on beauty, 

G 



98 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the science of beauty. This want of comprehension 
is a serious blemish of asceticism. 

" After all," continues Mr. Kipling, " what's the 
use of art ? " 

" A confession of the inability to realize life, is it 
not ? " 

" One never knows exactly what one wants. 
What remains of a writer is a page, perhaps, a 
line or so. Do you know Loti ? I admire him 
very much. Is he a good officer ? From the pro- 
fessional point of view, I mean ? " 

"Oh yes, a very good officer; he puts a touch of 
dandyism into it ; after all, it's not so very difficult, 
even for a man afflicted with imagination." 

Mr. Kipling gives one of his very young laughs, 
but he gladly reveals his love for the qualities of 
action. He is not an ideologist. The virtue of facts 
and deeds remains the cardinal virtue to him, as to 
all his race. Here is a great professor of energy. 

We now talk of French prose. My interlocutor 
names his favourite authors : Rabelais, Maupassant ; 
while owning to a great fondness for About. Of 
Flaubert he has read only Madame Bovary and does 
not like it. I have another opportunity of observing 
one of those classifications of preferences which seem 
so curious to a Frenchman. The name of d'Annunzio 
leads to a very instructive declaration against ero- 
ticism : 

^' It must be my oriental leanings," says Mr. Kip- 
ling, " but I don't like a woman outside her house, 
in fiction properly so-called. She is charming in 



A VISIT TO RUDYARD KIPLING 99 

real life, but one has seen a little too much of her in 
literature. There are so many other subjects. . . ." 

As I listen to all this, I cannot help thinking that 
the chastity of the English novel proceeds from 
causes deeper than cant. The word hypocrisy 
supplies a somewhat curt explanation. As a matter 
of fact, this people is perhaps the least sensual of 
all. Love represents to it a distraction which can 
be dodged by means of work or sport : among the 
superior types, passion assumes a character of 
respectful idealization ; among the others, it is a 
brutal and rapid gratification : it rarely impregnates 
a man's whole life or wields an avowed tyranny 
over his senses. We Latins produce on the English 
the effect of strange monomaniacs. Our French 
genius, so profoundly penetrated with sensuality 
in every degree — Renan, France, Louys — alarms 
them. Whether it be because of a less advanced 
degree of civilization or for the lack of certain 
nervous fascicles oi association (which is almost the 
same thing), an Englishman will always deny that 
sensuality approximates to the absolute. 

Mr. Kipling speaks very sympathetically of France. 
One does very wrong to picture him in the image of 
a fierce disturber of the peace. He says very sin- 
cerely, with a touch of blarney, that he would be 
sorry to see war break out between his country and 
that of the best story-tellers in the world, the masters 
of his trade. He extols the delight of living on 
our hospitable soil. His father has just returned 
from spending a fortnight among the fishermen on 



' -4 



100 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the Norman coast. Whereupon I complain of those 
excessive attractions which France presents to her 
children and which beget a commonplace spirit of 
thrift, of stay-at-home pusillanimity and of pre- 
tentious indifference. 

" Yes, they are too well off," cries Mr. Kipling. 
•' You ought to hide Paris from them for a century 
or so. Then you'd see how they would wake 
up." 

We spoke of war just now. The subject of the 
Transvaal follows easily enough. Mr. Kipling 
refers to it without magniloquence, as a question of 
the day, and he understands, with infinitely more 
tact than some of his contemporaries, that this is no 
lyrical matter. It is an unpleasant affair that has 
got to be settled, a low job of the struggle. This is 
tacitly expressed. I tell him that I had heard his 
name blessed (in connection with the Absent-minded 
Beggar Fund, to which they owed the breeches 
which they had on them) by Canadian volunteers 
in London who spoke only French and he tells me 
the story of a banquet, at the Cape, I think, where 
the military director of the railways, a Canadian 
too, sang at the hour of effusion the old Norman 
villanelle, Rossignolet du bois sauvage ! 
We talk on. 

As he sees me out, Mr. Kipling assures me, with 
a smile, that Rottingdean is one of the landing- 
points of the French squadron which, according to 
the papers, is to attack England : 

" I don't believe it, do you ? Is there really a 



THE NAVAL REVIEW loi 

chance of war ? The nationalists : what about 
them ? " 
And we shake hands. 



At Spithead, on the night of the naval review. A 
real English grey sky has reigned all day over the 
jade-green Solent. It suits these things which it has 
always set off : the people to whom it has given their 
clear skins and their souls at once matter-of-fact and 
misty, clad alike in figures and spectral dreams; 
the countless ships in which they have placed all 
their strength and all their pride. It is a wonderful 
night. The wooded shores, pricked with lights, 
stand jout in great masses ; the boats at anchor 
mirror their lanterns in the calm water, where the 
reflections throb with a restless movement. The 
moon, already high in the sky, dims the fires of 
land and gulf. There is a delicious stillness on the 
deck of the yacht, a stillness amid which is heard a 
violin that sounds far away and sings almost in my 
ears, to a very soft piano-accompaniment, that 
sublime and despairing lied of Schumann's, In der 
Fremde. A salt breath rises, across which the two 
shores of the sea exchange scents of lime-trees and 
hay. And, in the blue darkness, shapes are vaguely 
conjectured, shapes of the land and the sea, squat 
dockyards, slender masts, armoured hulls, a whole 
vigil of phantoms drowsy with other than gentle 
dreams. A strong instinct echoing on itself makes 



102 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

this delusively idyllic and dreamy peace keep time 
to the regular breathing of its will. A drama of 
energy is enacted amid this pastoral scenery. Does 
not humanity, everlastingly struggling to realize a 
higher type, force to the surface here, in this special 
point of its planet and its duration, this proud and 
passionate desire ? The century that is beginning 
shall tell us. Man, who passes, has it as his most 
sacred duty to greet the race that has received the 
torch, even though it were from the dying hands of 
his own brothers. He owes it this homage, dignified 
by his own mourning, were it only because of the 
lap that has been covered towards the goal, that tall 
column among the olive-trees where the wandering 
light, henceforth fixed by the deliverers, will burn, 
erect and clear, in the smiling sky, to guide the 
future. 

What a wealth of emotion is that of this evening ! 
So many elements and supreme forces have come to 
take part in it! Art, luxury, the darkness, the 
waves panting around us, the sorrowful intoxication 
of invincible effort at its own cup, the voluptuous- 
ness of feehng every note of our most intimate themes 
arouse an harmonic rustling in the depths of all 
life's mysteries ! . . . The " Lights out ! " sounds 
from ship to ship. It is not the same melancholy 
martial flourish as with us. It is sadder still, perhaps ! 
It translates, in its manner, the doubt of the closing 
day, the uncertainty of the morrow, the weariness 
of barbarous tasks, the nostalgia of other things 
and other places. The coming of sleep is proclaimed 



THE NAVAL REVIEW 103 

gravely in it, as it were that of death. Then, the 
will becomes relaxed in slumber. Proud schemes, 
lucid ideas prostitute themselves in the darkness to 
the ridiculous gnomes and inconsistent phantoms of 
dreams. The clenched fist opens of itself, humbly, 
with the base and imploring gesture of begging, of 
begging some boon from veiled destiny. Those 
distant bugles ! I seem to hear in them a wail ; 
man's protest as he drags himself along the harsh 
road behind the ever fleeing ideal, whose face he 
will never look upon, unless the ideal turn round to 
devour him; an infinitely pathetic voice; a timid 
prayer that does not wish to be heard ; a choir of 
obscure victims in the darkness. But what matter ! 
To-morrow, in the pure and valiant dawn, we will 
begin again, freed of the enervating dreams of the 
night, more intelligent, more logical, more cruel and 
stronger than before. 



PART THE SECOND: 
EGYPT 



CHAPTER I 
CADIZ— GIBRALTAR— SPANISH DANCES 



It is Sunday night. The yacht lies at anchor, at 
some distance from the harbour. A rough wind, the 
choppy, foaming waves and a broken pipe in the boiler 
of the steam-pinnace have kept us on board. Some 
of the sailors, with the stewards, are gathered on 
deck beside the galley, singing hymns in honour 
of the " Sabbath." Our crew is almost exclusively 
Scotch : thick-set fellows, firmly built, red-faced, 
red-haired, expressing, deliberately, unhurriedly, 
truths devoid of all originality in an accent in which 
the r's roll like wagons loaded with the weight of a 
compact thought. An Irishman once said to me : 

" One could write down the receipt of the average 
Anglo-Saxon intelligence as of a pudding. It's 
heavy and massive, it's turned out in the same 
mould, you know where it begins and where it stops, 
it is made of the same ingredients and has the same 
flavour." 

These are Milesian exaggerations. They make 
capital sailors, these children of the Lowlands and 



io8 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the misty Clyde, even though life does not appear to 
them in the same light as to M. Maurice Donnay. 
At this moment they are singing : 

A few more years shall roll, 

A few more seasons come, 
And we shall be with those that rest 

Asleep within the tomb : 
Then, O my Lord, prepare 

My soul for that great day ; 
Oh, wash me in Thy precious Blood 

And take my sins away. 

On a French liner, in similar circumstances, some 
wag would repeat the last " creation " of Mademoi- 
selle Camelia, the darling of the Marseilles Alcazar. 
This young lady would herein declare her contempt 
for too-confiding husbands, or else the deep-seated 
eclecticism of her tastes in love, provided that you 
*' plank down the rhino : " a joke, one of the 
old French school and, for that matter, unspeakably 
humorous, which never fails to bring down the 
house. 

And over there, on shore, in the silver city, 
under the new moon, the guitars sing, twang or ring 
under the touch of the closed fists ; a nimble, 
elastic voluptuousness stamps its heels, sways its 
haunches, rattles with its hoarse throat and snaps 
its fingers : 

Viva Cadiz, porque tiene 

Las murallas a la mar ! . . . 



GIBRALTAR 109 



By the circular road which almost skirts the sea, 
around the crest of whitish rocks, where, among the 
aloes and cactuses, monkeys disport themselves — 
the only distant cousins of our race which we have 
allowed to survive in Europe — we reach the promon- 
tory whence our world looks closer upon Africa, the 
land of marvels as yet mysterious. It was here that 
Hercules, bringing with him the curiosity and the 
terrors of the ancient soul, halted before the tomb of 
the Atlantides, the glaucous deep with the inconstant 
levels, which rushes or flees under sad horizons. 
The hero followed no further the bellowings of the 
herds of the brigand Geryon. The Duque d'Ossuna, 
who, according to his pedigree, is descended from 
Geryon in person, still grazes his bulls at the foot of 
the British fortress. We are in a country of 
traditions. 

Here is Europa Point. From the scarified chalky 
rocks, on which a very sparse vegetation casts its 
blue shadows, we look straight down upon the 
restless sea, with its bottom of brown weeds, 
where the prickly sea-urchin sleeps with the fish 
among the pebbles of the deep. We see sentries, a 
semaphore, a few huts in which sergeants' wives 
discuss things and scrub their brats. And, opposite, 
lies the Morocco coast. One must needs look 
with some emotion on the shore of the great black 
continent. The crescents and horse-tails of Islam 



no THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

adorn this gate of the desert and of darkness. But 
one cannot help reflecting that, except at its eastern 
extremity, Egypt, this land has never fostered any 
high activity of either thought or art. How different an 
historical and ancestral wealth is that which tempts 
you in the presence of Asia, the mother of our myths, 
our languages and our Gods ! How different a thrill 
passes through you, how much more copious a 
melancholy seizes upon you before that sublime dust 
where, on our knees, we seek the hesitating and 
sacred footsteps of our fathers ! Africa is the fetich 
in front of the thatched hut, the fihbuster in front of 
the strong-box. Asia says, Heraclitus, Jesus, 
Buddha ; Africa answers, Mumbo Jumbo, Jameson 
and Rhodes. 

3 

Dissolve pepper and powdered glass in methylated 
spirits and you have manzanilla. The glasses leave 
round stains on the painted wood of the little tables. 
We are sitting on rush-bottomed stools. A fat 
person is spinning round on the platform. A voice 
is heard, in the midst of the silence : 

" Oh, what a fine woman to kill mosquitoes on ! " 

" Olle ! OIU!" screams Snows in my ear (she is 
called Snows and her companion Dolours), in a tone 
enough to make me jump in the air. 

She has a mordant, strident voice, this gipsy of a 
Snows, and, in a jumbled fashion, she tells me 
wonderful things : that she comes from Paris ; that 
she has danced at the Folies-Bergere, like Mile. 



SPANISH DANCES iii 

Otero ; and will I give her five francs ? Well, for 
the Petenera, there's no one to equal her. What 
panther-like bounds, what hips, what fierce dives 
forward, head down, suddenly arrested in a gesture 
of calling, of surrender, of defiance, with arched 
loins, outstretched neck, head flung back till the 
comb that sets off her black chignon touches her 
shoulder-blades! At other moments, the dancers 
cut very high capers, cross one another, lift one 
another off the ground slanting-wise, like nervous, 
wiry marionettes. 

Oh, the extraordinary fascination of these dances I 
The pure intoxication of this rhythm at once marvel- 
lously simple and refined ! It is like a possession, 
the assault of a genius that lifts its prey by the hair, 
a sacred delirium expressive of the mysteries on this 
side and that of thought, animal and divine in 
one, Pan swelling his haunches with his mighty 
brawls 1 . . . 

Follow upon one another the frivolous and charm- 
ing Sevillana, the more Arab, less flighty, intenser 
Zapateo, the Tango, in which the dancer stamps 
her foot as though with carnal impatience and 
voluptuous rage. On the stage, the women clap 
their hands, never to the powerful beat of the 
measure ; the haunting guitar drones on ; a man 
beats time with a stick on a wooden stool. You 
are obsessed, captured by a rhythm. The tyranny 
of a tune with mysterious associations, with magic 
secrets, sways you and bends you. It sometimes 
suddenly changes and then it is like a little spasm. 



112 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Or it has marvellous pauses, perturbing to the pitch 
of anguish, with the sigh of a human voice at the 
end, some " Ahi ! " of wonderful value, which upsets 
you like the revelation of a new sorrow. . . . 

Great minds have felt this as yet unanalyzed 
power of the dance and of rhythmics in general. 
Nietzsche calls himself a dancer. Who will state 
the formula of this imperious, veiled beauty ? Who 
knows ? A scholar in his laboratory or a poet in 
his tower ? Have we not already learnt that " truth 
is a rhythm ? " 



CHAPTER II 

AT SEA— CAIRO 



Cosmopolitanism is in a fair way to becoming pro- 
vincial. With our improved communications, men 
leave their homes without fear or qualm and we 
meet always the same faces, from the glaciers of 
St. Moritz to the sands of Biskara, under the yacht- 
ing-caps of Cowes and the grey felt hats with which 
Nice decks its shores. Cosmopolitan provincialism, 
that is what it is. . . . 

Fashion and the seasons fling this noisy wave 
from one sea-side place to the other. Its iridescent 
foam flies with every puff of the winds to the 
country-houses, the capitals and the gaols. Nothing 
destroys man's longing for the life of the herd. It 
weighs fatally upon all those idlers who have individ- 
ually endeavoured to escape its monotony or merely 
to evade the police. In any case, this mixed world, 
a little tarnished, a little spurious, this world of 
consumptive archdukes, over-dressed, slack-baked 
youths, peeresses who have graced the music-hall 
stage, Lithuanian or Buddhist baronesses forms a 

H 



114 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

rather modern and amusingly " high " swarm of 
humanity. 



We are two Frenchmen on board the great P. and 
O. which is to drop us at Port Salfd. The sensation 
of passing suddenly from the quays of Marseilles to 
British territory strikes one curiously. For it is 
English life that we shall lead for the next five days. 
We shall see successful novelists play cricket on 
deck, in a sort of huge net-work cage, with young 
subalterns bound for India ; we shall have stiff, 
soulless meals ; and old ladies will sulk if any one 
opens the piano on Sunday. As for flirtation, it 
will be carried on by the unmarried ladies on board 
with that perseverance and that good practical sense 
which have made England's greatness. 

They have a significant verb in this country : " to 
go in for." They do not say, " I like tennis ; " they 
say, " I go in for tennis." It is the same with 
photography, entomology, rowing or Greek verse. 
They have no notion of things done lightly, of 
"initiations conferred with a smile." All is busi- 
ness, even their sports. And so is flirtation. For that 
matter, its difficulties are increased in England, 
where the supply exceeds the demand, where woman 
plays so secondary a part, where the mission of a 
lawful angel in the house is the only one within the 
reach of a young girl, who has not, as in Catholic 
countries, the convent to which to retire with her 
distrust of men and the future. 



CAIRO 115 



3 

Bonifacio, Messina have extinguished their lights 
behind our ships ; Stromboli has displayed its ruddy 
cone by fitful gleams ; snowy Crete reminded us of 
Pasiphae; this morning, over the sea yellow with 
the ooze of the Nile, old Egypt looms on the 
horizon. 

Two hours later, we reach Port Said, the swarm, 
ing, shouting Arabs, black with coal-dust on the top 
of their copper-coloured skins, who fill the coal- 
holes of the Caledonia^ the docks and the curious 
ugliness of those buildings which are not forty years 
old and which shelter the most mixed population, men 
and women, on the face of the globe. 



4 
Early the next day, all the morning noises of 
Cairo come to rouse the good tourist from the still 
rolling and pitching sleep of his first night in 
Egypt. There is a general movement, an uproar, 
a prodigality of sounds and useless gestures, a 
humming as of a hive. The water-vendors utter 
their cries, while the goatskin water-bottle displays 
a quivering belly between its four stumps ; the blind 
beggars drone their monotonous sing-song as they 
waddle past and their empty sockets swarm with 
flies ; the guttural " Aa .' " of a donkey-boy trotting 
with the skirt of his blue galabiyeh held between 



u6 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

his teeth answers the cry of the vendor of cos- 
metics : 

" Henna ! Henna ! Flowers of paradise ! " 

Some of these Arab street-cries are charming. 
That young negro, who, in an old pickle-box, 
balances on his head a wonderful cluster of jonquils, 
whose saffron hue appears yet more delicate above 
his black wool, says, as he holds out bunches of 
roses in either hand : 

"It was but a thorn; a drop of the prophet's 
sweat made it blossom." 

And this melon-seller sings : 

" O consoler of the embarrassed, O water-melon ! " 

The sight is delicious, the first stroll unforget- 
table ; the warm sun makes you think of the frosts 
in which you have left your country, the palm-trees 
rustle in the gardens of the Ezbekieh — a little 1830, 
but charming — and you wander about amid the 
eastern sunlight and the unaccustomed clamour ; 

" O consoler of the embarrassed, O water-melon ! " 



CHAPTER III 

ENTERTAINMENTS 



At the Court ball. The East is taking to sober 
luxury. The East, alas, is on the point of acquiring 
" taste I " All that charm of useless, magnificent 
extravagance which used to enchant our imagination 
is dying. Factory-chimneys profane the horizon 
around Cairo, a black dust sullies the streaked 
fantasy of Moslem manners and, above the grey 
suits of conquest, the red flower, with its drooping 
pistil, of the national tarboosh is fading, soon to 
wither away for good. 

In this well-kept palace, amid this correct festivity, 
there is not a thing wrong: one would give half- 
a-crown to light, by chance, upon a drawing-room 
such as,"ifor instance, you will find at the Bardo, in 
Tunis, adorned (O aesthetic problem !) with twelve 
similar clocks ; you would hug a guest who, at the 
buffet, should dare, in accordance with the old form of 
etiquette (which, let me tell you, sir, was quite as good 
as the new), to express his favourable opinion of the 
supper. Alas, there is none of all this ! They have 



ii8 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

even passed the " so-so " stage : the supper is good, 
deplorably good, even cold, O triumph ! . . , The 
siamboulme, or ceremonial frock-coat, alternates with 
the dress-coat; the women are fat, behind soft- 
curving Levantine noses, and not agreeable to look 
at; the sovereign takes Lady Cromer round the 
room, with an incurably official solemnity, to the 
strains of a waltz to which not a native waist keeps 
time. 

Scarcely does the curious eye rest upon a sort of 
cage, behind whose wire grating female forms are 
vaguely outlined ; it is dark in that place (not so 
dark but that one can see that the dresses come 
from a good maker) ; the captive princesses are able 
to see, themselves unseen, the couples mingling in the 
dance. The principle of this installation is sufficiently 
well-known and doubtless the idea was brought back 
from Paris by an observant pasha. O modernity, 
modernity! ... 



The interior of the opera-house is commonplace 
and pretty. One would think one's self in any of 
the smaller Paris theatres built under the Empire, 
were it not for the low-necked dresses of the women 
and, in the stage-box on the right and five or six 
of the boxes on the grand tier, for the great bulging 
screens, painted with white flowers, behind which, at 
times, the ladies of the harem move about like 
ghosts. 

We are in an English box. Our host is a finished 



ENTERTAINMENTS 1 1 9 

specimen of that young generation of politicians and 
diplomatists, soon to become statesmen, which has 
produced such men as Mr. George Wyndham and 
Lord Curzon. In the other boxes are a number 
of flowers of the Levant, tumultuous beauties, with 
diversified pedigrees. Outside the Court circle there 
is a very curious mixture in this society. And official 
contact brings about the most comical conjunctions. 
Nothing could be more amusing, for instance, than 
the visit of an old English lady, full of prejudices, a 
member of pious societies and innumerable Exeter 
Halls, to some ex-slave who has become a princess, 
thanks to her peculiar talents, or to an old hanum 
notorious for having had a score of lovers strangled, 
when they had ceased to please, and flung into the 
Nile (they show you the window). For this reason, 
a princess of legally royal birth (this often thrusts 
back the plebeian origin for but one or two genera- 
tions) is particularly run after. They tell me of the 

Princess N -, who has become quite Europeanized 

and who even — an unprecedented fact — invites her 
male friends to lunch. If I were she, I should be 
very careful when I went to Constantinople: the 
Sultan has a love for the old customs and a sack 
dropped into the Bosphorus is a thing still some- 
times seen, or else there is that smart yacht, with 
the sliding plug, on which councillors too dis- 
tinguished for their integrity are taken for a sail on 
fine evenings. . . . 

We continue to exchange observations by turns 
profound and racy. An English private box is 



I20 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

never commonplace. In the spring, in London, I 

heard Das Rheingold with young H , who was 

then still suffering from a wound received at Omdur- 
man and who has since been killed in the Transvaal ; 
this time, it is Slatin Pasha, the Austrian in the 
British service, who was kept a prisoner in the 
Sudan for no less than fourteen years. He is here, 
looking very neat, in a trim mess-jacket, and one 
would never recognize the ragged slave whom the 
English released, after three lustres of captivity : 
a great gap in a man's life ! 



CHAPTER IV 
TEMPLES AND TOMBS 



There is always something unnatural and sacri- 
legious in those collections of beautiful things which 
we call museums. Every work has a right to its 
special atmosphere, as well as every memory. But, 
without reckoning the injury done to each of the 
exhibited objects by the too great effort demanded of 
human attention, those master-pieces formed into 
regiments, those majesties turned and twisted about, 
those withered charms catalogued by archaeologists : 
all this is painful. How much more so in this palace 
of Gizeh, so artificial, so cruelly Second Empire, with 
the faults of taste of architects careless of eternity, 
working for a sort of Yankees in a hurry, a low 
ugliness, without that vague and rather humorous 
poetry of the out-of-fashion which was charming and 
which will one day be admired again : the out-of- 
fashion, that ungrateful age of the bibelot! And 
here, under assembly-room stuccoes and coffee-house 
gildings, amid the inferior decorations of the Ver- 
sailles of a Mameluk bankrupt, the ephemeral fantasy 



122 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of a croupier King of Bavaria, stand fifty formidable 
centuries of memories, lie the embalmed remains of 
the people that fought, perhaps, more desperately 
than any other against the forces of destruction. 

Those mummies ! Their variety of expression is 
astounding. Some are terrible, like the great Sesos- 
tris, who died at more than a hundred years of age, 
that Louis XIV. of Egypt, with the eagle nose, with 
two lines of green paint under his eyes ; others are 
pretty : Queen Amenhotep sleeps under garlands of 
russet flowers gracefully twined round her young 
breasts — a wasp remained in the coffin when they 
closed it — or else a hardly nubile little girl smiles, a 
Gioconda of the sepulchre, between the gold and 
enamel walls on which she is represented " treading 
evil principles under foot ; " others, lastly, are mys- 
terious, as that of this unknown young man — the 
sarcophagus, generally so prolix, bears no name— 
whose entrails were not removed in accordance with 
the usual custom : he seems to have died of poison. 
We have here a forgotten palace tragedy, an unap- 
peased Nemesis restored to light in vain. 

The jewels, especially, arrest our attention, the 
wonderful discoveries of Dusher. There are here 
pectorals of architectural beauty, gold and paste, 
which seem destined rather to enhance the glamour 
of a conqueror than the attractions of a woman, for 
they are too wide not to claim the flat breast of a 
victor ; they seem to have just come from the artist's 
delicate fingers, so clear do their outlines, so fresh 
does their colouring remain. There are necklaces of 



TEMPLES AND TOMBS 123 

pearls, which have all, alas, died on their mistresses' 
bosoms: their gold clasps represent two hawks' 
heads ; others formed of plates of enamel strung to- 
gether, each of which bears one of the hieroglyphics 
of " health, durability and prosperity : " the enamels 
in the delicate patterns have flattened their tints, the 
lacquered tones have united with the metal to form 
apricot, pale violet, silvery green and absinthe. . . . 
Then the mirrors : one, very old, dating to one of 
the earliest dynasties, once the property of Queen 
Ahotpu, is all of ebony and gold, heavy and massive, 
and might have served to cleave the heads of inat- 
tentive slaves ; in another, a little female swimmer 
holds up the oxydized silver shell. There are in- 
numerable pots, in alabaster, or in obsidian hooped 
with gold, to contain cosmetics or eye-washes ; 
diadems shaped like a wreath of flowers with their 
dainty woven-work on which the stones seem to 
blossom, or else huge, drowning in the mighty 
tresses of a royal head the meditation of two 
collared sphinxes; kohl-tongs, eardrops, scarabs, 
mystic uraei, bracelets and jewelled sprays, sheaths 
and rings. ... 



The first time that I saw the Sphinx was under 
the dark sky of one of the few rainy days that the 
year allows to Egypt, Cairo reminds one a little of 
Glasgow on those days. When I returned, a rich 
yellow light fell in slanting rays on the emerald 
green of the fat soil — a deep green, fed by the ooze 



124 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of tropical Africa — and two rainbows danced around 
the horizon. 

Another day, on horseback, after a gallop in the 
hostile desert, on that border riddled with tombs 
whose incorruptible dead have not the temptation to 
set out on their metamorphoses along the stalks of 
the plants towards a sun which would kill anew this 
nevertheless more humble effort of life, we saw the 
monster in the devouring light of Ra, the noon-god, 
the hawk-headed master, who holds the sacred flail, 
makes the mud of the Nile to steam and bites the 
skulls of men. All was aflame. Flickering lights 
played about the mutilated lines of the haughty face. 
The head lifted its flat-nosed majesty in the impla- 
cable rays, seemed to revel in the splendour of the 
sun. 'Twas but one more noon after thousands ot 
others : this stone has been baked by more summers 
than either science or faith dares to enumerate. 

But all these recollections vanish in the impression 
left upon the memory by the sight of the Sphinx by 
moonlight. Then, the odious Bedouins, whose pres- 
ence and importunity protect you so well against 
any true emotion, have regained their mud houses 
in the village of Gizeh. We are in the silence 
and we feel the timid lips of beauty laid upon our 
soul. And yet a sense of oppression pervades the 
atmosphere : there is a certain terror in feeling one's 
self form a third in the dialogue of that divine beast, 
representing none remembers what, and the barren 
moon, round and "parched with agnosticism," as 
Laforgue says. The pyramids are spectral under 



TEMPLES AND TOMBS 125 

the cold light. The mind feels those formidable ab- 
stractions give way of which it has made the carya- 
tides of reason : number, space, duration. Far away, 
a jackal wails, like sorrow, over all these things. 



3 

Four enormous arcades border the immense court ; 
the pavement of precious marble billows round the 
central fountain that murmurs under its open dome. 
In the arch that forms the porch of the mosque proper, 
a frieze runs at nearly thirty yards above the ground 
and is one of the decorative marvels of all climes. 
Amid the efflorescence and the exuberance of the 
vegetal arabesques, the noble Cufic characters unfold 
themselves in a grave procession. By their gait, their 
majesty, one feels that they do not hesitate on what 
they have to say and we, who come too late, think 
that they did well not to hesitate, seeing that they 
are beautiful and that beauty creates truth. 

All is colossal in this mosque of El Hakim, the 
largest in Egypt, dating from the heroic times of 
Islam. But what decay! Yet there is here a 
Society for the Preservation of Monuments of Arabian 
Art. And beside us stands a new mosque, abandoned 
in the building. In this strange country, men seem 
to look upon the palace and the temple, the place 
where they sleep and the place where they will come 
to sleep, as personal possessions, not to be handed 
down. They build themselves a house of life and a 
house of death and, by the time that their occupant 



126 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of an hour has crumbled to dust, these dwellings 
become useless, like worn-out clothes, and their ruin 
is respected. The outskirts of Cairo are full of these 
shut, empty palaces, standing in their neglected 
gardens, gardens of fierce weeds that assail the 
shutters closed upon the old mysteries and the old 
loves. And, in the town, everywhere, crazy domes 
split open, like fruits in autumn, and minarets 
bend over, like the wax candles by a dead man's 
side. 

In the interior of the gigantic monument, which 
we enter with our feet in huge babooshes fastened 
over our boots, the alveolate wainscoting hangs from 
the walls, showing its bare frames, threatening the 
sultan's tomb. This tomb, simple with a simplicity 
that becomes pharisaical by dint of exaggeration, 
stands at the height of a foot from the ground, before 
the onyx niche of the hojahy where the eight little 
columns that bear the archivolt are eight dead tur- 
quoises. 

Below, on the matting, an Arab prays, sways from 
side to side, raises his voice and, right up above, in 
the cupola, we see a turtle-dove, the bee of this 
spoiled hive. Oriental poetry loves the turtle-dove, 
ascribes to it thoughts of meditation and mourning, 
doubtless on seeing it too amorous. I remember 
observing some, the other day, among the stones of 
the Place of Lamentation at Jerusalem. And I think 
of that verse of Isaias : 

I will cry like a young swallow, I will meditate 
like a dove. 



TEMPLES AND TOMBS 127 



4 

The Nile, like a stem whose roots are plunged in 
mystery, spreads over this Egypt the flower of a 
monstrous past, heavy with funeral perfumes that 
intoxicate like death itself. The inebriation is felt 
by many of those who live here and are not satiated 
with the fulsomeness of politics or the wild enjoy- 
ments of subscription-dances. Sooner or later, they 
all begin to dig : romantic Frenchmen, cautious 
Germans, the very English themselves ! 

This trade of the jackal or body-snatcher seems to 
become a most exciting sport. There is no resisting 
the contagious emotion of a Mariette describing his 
first descent into the warm darkness of the Serapeum, 
between the two rows of huge sarcophagi where slept 
the sacred bulls : the anguish of the old creeds, the 
unspeakable dread before those silent symbols ! Nor 
was it a vulgar trip that Bruggs Bey took from 
Luxor to Cairo, escorting King Sesostris, son of 
Osimandias, along the Nile to the final stage of his 
last sleep, while the fellaheen uttered their funeral 
shrieks and, from the banks, a bitter and piercing 
wail resounded and all the land of Egypt mourned 
the dead Pharaoh once again as it did three thousand 
years ago. 

And those tombs! The existence of the dead 
man is revived in all its simple homeliness : we see 
him at work in the fields, fighting in the wars, hunt- 
ing on the rivers, dancing after a banquet. The 



128 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

little wife lifts to her master's knee the lotus-flower 
of domestic peace and grace. Here, mowers stick 
flowers into the top of a finished stack ; behind a 
herd of asses, a slave speaks, as a line of hiero- 
glyphics over his head recites : 

" The diligent are rewarded and the idle beaten. 
If only you could see yourselves ! " 

Go to those tombs and then come back at even, at 
the hour when Tmu, who is the declining sun, sets 
his vermiHon foot on the Libyan sands. There will 
be villages, amid palm-trees around a gilded pool, and 
colossal statues stretched upon their backs, whose 
navel, under the cut modillion, slakes with a few 
drops of the last rain the same wagtails which you 
have just seen among the dancing-girls with their 
too-slender waists, figured on the wall of the tomb to 
cheer its inmates during their long leisure. 

Scarce a sound ; the birds are dumb : one of the 
profoundest impressions o)" the journey is this absence 
of the rumours of life in the plains of which old Nile, 
according to the hymn of Enna, cleaves the middle 
even as Ra cleaves the middle of the sky. Egypt is 
silent : she has too many dead to watch. 



5 
In a dark caftan and yellow babooshes, I have 
come to see the sunset from my roof at Bulak. On 
the neighbouring terraces are goats and fowls ; an 
Arab, anxious for the safety of a goose that has vent- 
ured on the ledge, fetches it back with the aid of a 



TEMPLES AND TOMBS 129 

long palm-branch. At the top of a minaret, I see the 
form of a muezzin proclaiming the glory of Allah on 
this ninth evening of Ramadan. A nearer minaret, 
pink and fluted, vainly lifts its balcony: no one 
appears there ; the mosque is deserted. A grey 
crow perches on the left horn of the crescent that 
adorns its point. In the west, following the line, 
close by, along which the Nile flows, the dainty 
lateen-yards of the cangias raise their mobile outlines 
beneath the vast golden dome. Over my head hangs 
the quite young moon. A palm-tuft rustles in the 
cool wind ; tambourines rattle up from the street. 
Yonder lie the mauve pyramids. This is the hour 
when, under the crescent moon, bodies begin to cast 
a shadow, a pale, vague shadow, as though all things, 
turned to precious stones by the magic of the twilight, 
do nothing but delay the light in their flanks of 
beryl, topaz and pearl. It is a diaphanous light : 
the great planet up there must aid it as well as the 
moon in its fleeting shadow-life ; and it goes down 
the stair of my terrace, regretfully, before me. 



CHAPTER V 

THE STREETS— HASHISH— IN LOWER EGYPT 



Here, the people spend their whole lives in the 
streets : shops, coffee-houses are but large alcoves 
opening on the public way. Lumber, dead cats, 
crumbling plaster-work, a chaotic heap of dusty 
rubbish where a little minaret tilts a wooden roof 
from which the sun has blistered the paint, or a palm- 
tree shivers in the wind. Amid these numberless 
ruins, in which appears the gaudily-painted door of 
a bath or the rush-carpeted threshold of a mosque 
crowded with prostrate worshippers, pass an imam 
on his white ass, proud of its bearing-rein, of the 
ornaments branded into its skin and of the learned 
babooshes that swing on either side of its saddle-bow ; 
an old eunuch, with scepticism written on his chaps 
(have you ever thought of the power of irony that a 
eunuch must possess?) ; verminous brats; dogs, with 
jackals' muzzles, barking at the heels of a hashish- 
eater bleating in ecstasy and deaf to the warning 
shout of a syce who, in a gold-braided jacket, white 
trousers and brown calves, runs, at full speed, ahead 



THE STREETS 131 

of an old-fashioned brougham, whence the inevitable 
black eyes under pencilled eye-brows appear " like 
suns under triumphal arches." 

Try to relish the taste of that advertisement printed 
in four languages and displayed in a Greek cafe in the 
Ezbekieh, opposite the Hotel Bristol. It says that 
Solomon X. will pay a reward of ten thousand 
piasters to whoever brings back alive his son Elias, 
aged sixteen, who disappeared on such and such a 
day. The sum will be paid in whatever condition 
the lad be restored. 

Is it not in the picture ? Imagine, in Paris, 

Mile, de , the daughter of the Baronne de , 

not returning in the evening from her masseuse (I am 
taking a violently improbable example). What a 
fuss would be made I Here, in a few days, the 
poster will disappear, even as the lost object has 
disappeared, and neither will ever be seen again. 
But, then, what about the benefits of the British 
occupation ? . . . 



We are in the midst of Ramadan, but Karagus 
no longer enlivens the joyous nights after the day 
of somnolence and fasting. Notwithstanding a cer- 
tain monotony in their catastrophes, these seances 
(if I may so express myself) of the Turkish Punchi- 
nello had their undoubted charm. He has been put 
down at Cairo as at Algiers : grave personalities 
were indulged in ; one used to see Lord Cromer, 
Queen Victoria, the President of the French Republic 



132 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

in grievous positions. But he still carries on at 
Tunis and I shall never forget the face of an arch- 
duchess who had arrived the day before in her yacht 
and who inadvertently made her entrance just as the 
dauntless hero was thrashing the policeman, in the 
Barbary fashion : a sheer delight 1 

Despite these prohibitions, you can still, in the 
open market-place, behind the mosque of Sultan 
Hassan, assist at frolics of the same order; and here 
it is no longer a question of shadows. The actors 
are the grandfather, the father and the three young 
sons ; and rarely have I seen a more united, family. 
After long preludes, dialogues in which, whenever a 
venerated name is spoken (for all this has a semi- 
rehgious character), the spectators kiss their hands 
in sign of respect, an indescribable scene takes place 
in the midst of the shrieks of enjoyment of an 
audience consisting mainly of little girls with fresh 
young smiles and of sharp lads showing their brown 
skins through the holes in their caftans. Monstrous 
artifices give body to the drama. Never was it more 
correct to say that all the jokes carried beyond the 
footlights. 

And this spectacle makes one reflect that there is 
no connection between a people's modesty and its 
morality, unless, indeed, these stand in an inverse 
ratio. Statistics tend to prove that morality is no 
higher in France or England than in Moslem coun- 
tries and, in spite of our ways of thinking, our cant 
here makes the effect of a ridiculous grimace and our 
modesty appears what it is, immodest. That brown 



THE STREETS 133 

flesh is unveiled without causing trouble ; a fair skin 
possesses one degree of nudity more. 

Observations of this kind can be multiplied during 
an evening spent in strolling through the muddy, 
lighted, screaming, tinkling streets, full of the mixed 
fumes of hashish, incense and whisky, which con- 
tain the night-houses of this city. Since the British 
occupation, the whole has assumed a less purely 
oriental colour. The late Queen of England, very 
stately, in her chromolithographed presentment, still 
looks down from behind the bars upon the colonial 
expansions of her children. Tender-hearted Tommy 
lifts the huge pot of beer which it takes three to 
empty towards " the dear old lady." Presently, 
while still contemplating her from the middle of the 
room, very drunk, he will strike up a song ful of 
heroic incidents, of men who blow themselves up 
with their families for the flag and other praiseworthy 
moral traits, with a pause and a hiccough between 
each verse. The signs bear the names The Rose of 
Kent, The Gallant Hussar ; beside them, you will 
read in Arabic letters, on a board hanging under a 
yellow candle-end, the names of the ladies who serve 
within, all as in the days of old; 

On a Saturday night, I have seen, in these streets 
of an infamous and penetrating charm, heaps of 
humanity piled into cabs, heaps which were all that 
remained till the morrow of the imposing carriage 
and the martial pride of gallant Mr. Atkins. His 
comrades, in whom drunkenness showed itself 
in an excessive rigidity, passed by, huge and 



134 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

solemn, riding back to barracks on the smallest of 
donkeys. 



3 

On the divan, at the side nearest the court-yard, 
with crossed legs, facing the stage, but with his eyes 
wandering over the ceiling or swooning under their 
painted lids, the man sings to the maddening strum- 
ming of the derbuka's tambourine and the high note 
of the shrill flute : 

" Thou hast made beauty ; Thou hast said to us, 
' Creature, admire ; ' Thou art beautiful Thyself; and 
Thou wouldst not have us adore it ? " 

Beauty is there on the platform, swaying her body 
to the monotonous sound of the little cymbals which 
she wears on the thumb and forefinger of her two 
hands. 

" Thou hast created beauty with the pink cheeks, 
even as Thou createdst Sultan Sleep. Why should 
we resist it further ? " 

"You see," says my companion, "here are the 
dance, the temptation and the song that comment, 
offer and invite. Charming, that special pleading 
with Allah, something indolent, ironical and volup- 
tuous very much in the eastern genius. Life amor- 
ously rocked in the arms of non-existence : there lies 
all their philosophy, Omar Khayyam sums up the 
science of humanity in this verse : 

" I came like Water, and like Wind I go," 



HASHISH 135 

Around us, men look and listen. Their eyes are lan- 
guid; at the tips of their fingers smoulder suspicious 
cigarettes, whose ash, white as pumice-stone, refuses 
to drop. The dark lady on the platform turns round 
and round, transformed into a peerless houri, a 
princess of intoxication and dreams in the smoke of 
those cigarettes. 

" Yes, they are real voluptuaries," continues my 
friend, " in spite of Michelet. . . Do you follow me ? " 

" I think so," 

" And quite near nature still, that is to say return- 
ing to nature, even when they seem furthest from it. 
But what does that mean : ' far from nature ? ' . . . 
Look at that dance . . . ." 

There is a noise of quarrelling at the door : a 
highlander is disputing some mysterious bargain 
with a donkey-boy. We hear hoarse Arab impre- 
cations, Scotch oaths that roll like pebble-stones, 
enormous things, lost in the night. But the delusive 
body continues to sway from side to side and the 
smokers have not turned their heads and my friend 
has not abandoned his idea : 

" Well, watch the movements of that dance, see 
what they mean. It is evidently the oldest form of 
art and all art has issued from there, from that body. 
First rhythm. Then music, soon isolated, no longer 
serving to accompany gestures, becomes a hymn, an 
opera, a symphony. Beethoven issued from that 
body. Then plastic art appears : clumsy strokes on 
reindeer-bones try to picture attitude, to jot down 
grace. The harmony of postures turns into a har- 



136 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

mony of shades. From all this springs poetry, the 
queen of rhythm and colour. Jean Bellin, Shak- 
speare issued from that body ! . . . . What's in 
those cigarettes ? " 

The smell is, in fact, growing more intense and it 
is not that of ordinary tobacco. 

" Imagine," he continues, '' a perfume that should 
contain at once intoxication, desire, vertigo and 
terror. ..." 

" You're drunk." 

A smoker suddenly begins to yell. ... 



4 

What a contrast — we notice it the moment that 
vre arrive — what a contrast between the fertile banks 
of the Delta and that Judsea which we have just left 
and which has already forgotten the Emperor — one 
more emperor, after so many others — and relapsed 
into its shy widowhood and the peace of its desola- 
tion ! We have set out on the Lower Nile, towards 
Mansurah and Damietta. It is not a hackneyed 
route ; at the most, a few sportsmen travel in this 
direction after game. There are not many ruins 
and yet it is a delightful river trip. 

On the arrival of the steam-yacht which takes us 
off as the only guests of a princely host, softly 
lolling on our huge divan, we have no reason to 
regret the terrible steamers with their narrow 
cabins (two passengers to the cabin) which convey 
the explorers of Upper Egypt to Thebes and Assuan, 



IN LOWER EGYPT 137 

with all the promiscuity of the top of an omnibus, or 
the slow dahabiyeh, which, though a floating resi- 
dence of infinite charm, remains rather delusive as a 
means of transport. We stop often. There is no 
traffic on the Nile at night. There is, first, the 
Barrage, amid the luxuriance of its gardens. An 
immense dike, built by one of our fellow-countrymen 
who is at this moment starving, retains the waters 
when the rising diminishes and throws them into 
the irrigating canals of the Delta, whose agricultural 
production has been increased by hundreds and 
hundreds of millions since the construction of this 
work of art. 

Next come Benha, Samanhud, where the Seben- 

nytic branch of the river begins, Mansurah 

And, on every hand, an incredible impression of 
richness : considerable towns on both banks, crowded 
and swarming ; factory-chimneys mingling with the 
minarets ; crops fostered with the richest mud of 
Ethiopia ; a dense population, busy and prospering 
in its humble needs. 

This evening, we reach Mansurah the chivalric, 
after gliding all day, steeped in idleness, past the 
customary villages, fellaheen and cattle, past the 
little children who pull up their galabiyeh to run 
along the bank after our plume of smoke, past the 
dogs barking on the threshold of the mud houses, 
the kids under the bellies of their dams and the 
great camels, which, at this golden hour, move on in 
light, following their shadow at a great distance ; 
and we remember what a river of orgies was this 
Nile of all the antiquities. . . , 



138 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

We are silent, a prey to the melancholy and 
voluptuous charm of the hour and the bells. An 
Arab sailor in the stern chants a monotonous song. 
I listen, anxious to know what he has to tell to the 
twilight. And it is simply a love-song, with a 
dreamy refrain : 

Oh, the night, the night, the night 
Oh, thine eyes, thine eyes, thine eyes ! 

And it is thus that we enter the city of St. Louis. 



PART THE THIRD 
INDIA 



CHAPTER I 

AT SEA— CALCUTTA— GAIETIES 



We cross the tropic this evening. Stretched on our 
deck-chairs, we enjoy the relative coolness of the 
open air as compared with that of the dining-room 
which we have just left, where the swing of the 
punkahs, those great fans worked from the outside 
by pensive, squatting Chinamen — the exercise must 
be singularly favourable to the development of the 
inner life 1 — only partly fills the place of the breeze 
on deck. 

You either like ocean travel or you don't. It 
seems that it unlooses your faculties, your energies ; 
that you get rid of your cob-webs in the dancing 
light and spray ; that you turn, as it were, into sea 
and sky. Your ego melts away, to be absorbed by 
the sky and the waters. You communicate with 
the elements. This is what plain men translate by 
saying that they feel absolutely stupefied. 

A friend responds to my thoughts and, lighting a 
cigarette : 

" What saves us from total absorption," he says, 



t42 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

"is the sense of speed, the intoxication of flight, the 
magic of the perpetual change of place. 

" Car les vrais voyageurs, ce sont ceux-lk qui partent 
Pour partir, cceurs Idgers semblables aux ballons, 
De leur fa ..." 

Here the reciter is interrupted by a pillow which, 
powerfully thrown, flattens itself on his face and, for 
the moment, stifles him. 

" I am awfully sorry," murmurs a timid voice, a 
voice which one would never have thought to belong 
to the living catapult that almost robbed me of a 
valued friendship. 

My companion, though purple in the face, tries to 
assume a playful air and declares : 

" Oh, it doesn't matter, really. The chair's strong 
and so is the ship. . . . Now that I know that it 
wasn't a hurricane. . . ." 

The fair-headed child looks like a jolly young 
orderly, sound and muscular and quite pink with 
confusion and merriment. Her victim, as he watches 
her move away, mutters cynical monstrosities about 
her future husband and the happiness in store for 
him. . . . 



The society on board suggests some observations 
on the Anglo-Indian woman, a type that often differs 
from the Englishwoman proper. 

There was a time when the length of the passage, 
the uncertainty of the morrow, the absence of re- 



AT SEA 143 

sources made it almost impossible for an European 
woman to face residence in India. At that time, the 
civil servants and military officers used to make 
such domestic arrangements as M^ere forced upon 
them by the fact that they went out there without 
any hope of returning for long years to come. It 
is easy to infer from this what prodigious energy 
and sacrifices the English race must have put forth 
to ensure its dominion in Hindustan. Modern pro- 
gress, starting with the opening of the Suez Canal, 
has changed all this. Every year, now, sees a 
phalanx of valorous women, prepared to rough it, 
as they say, setting out to join their husbands, 
husbands-to-be or brothers, wherever these may be : 
on the frozen frontiers of the North, among the 
hostile tribes ; in the plague-stricken districts of the 
South ; or in the solitudes of the Central Provinces, 
scorched by the sun, overrun with jungle, teeming 
with snakes, where news is rare because of the great 
distances and of the tigers that eat the postmen. 
No doubt, we must take into account, among the 
motives that prompt these migrations, the lack of 
means, the incentive of an involuntary celibacy : a 
husband is an article more easily found in the 
colonies. But no matter, it is all very wonderful 
and admirable; and there is not a Frenchwoman 
but, rather than go to India, would go to the bad. 

Pending their arrival in the land where fevers, 
paludal anaemia, cobras and love await them, our 
amazons expend the excess of energy of their 
conquering race in pillow-fights on a large scale. 



144 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

And some one tells me the story of that girl, over 
there, on the second-class deck. He has it from an 
English officer to whom he talks sometimes. Miss 

B is travelling all alone to join the man to 

whom she is engaged. He is not only a Quaker, 
but also employed on the railways. She herself is 
a serious person, a little too serious even, and does 
not play with the cushions. She will turn missionary, 
one of these days, perhaps, and bore poor coolies to 
death in her endeavours to take from them their 
simple faith in Hanuman, the monkey-god, or 
Ganesa, who has an elephant's trunk. Meanwhile, 
the young couple will not be rich enough to set up 
house and will live in a railway-carriage ! Cer- 
tainly, the Indian trains are comfortable ; but what 
a perturbing thought, this honeymoon trip which 
will never end, a modern and exotic variant of Paolo 
and Francesca's whirlwind I . . . 



3 

The new Viceroy is to make his entry into Cal- 
cutta. The streets are lined with troops : sepoys 
with pointed turbans ; English soldiers with yellow 
faces, poor fellows whom beer makes anaemic under 
this devouring sky; proud native horsemen, com* 
manded by fair-haired officers. Behind the soldiers 
stands the silent Hindu crowd : fat, oily Bengali 
babus ; citizens with resigned faces, their brown legs 
showing through the thin fabric of their cotton 
drawers ; a few sahibs, for whom the populace makes 



CALCUTTA 145 

room with the servility indispensable before a white 
face. 

The talk runs, in particular, on the Vicereine, the 
beautiful Lady Curzon, so much admired in London, 
whose hats have been enumerated and her dress- 
bodices described (even with some impertinence) 
in the papers. Happy dwellers in Calcutta, who 
will see all these marvels ! The tourist lost in the 
crowd catches only a smile, a pair of fine eyes, 
under a handsome ostrich-feather that nods with 
dignity . . . 

The troops return through the streets ; carriages 
drive past filled with gold-laced officials, dazzling 
generals, rajahs visiting the capital, among whom I 
notice one with five rows of admirable pearls on 
a pink tunic, a snowy turban and gold-rimmed 
spectacles. 

4 
This is the great week, made still greater this year 
by the arrival of the Viceroy. The Viceroy's Cup, 
the Indian Derby, was run the other day; the 
Christmas festivities have brought a large number of 
people from the provinces ; everything is crammed : 
hotels, clubs, boarding-houses. And the boarding- 
house plays a great part in the life of Calcutta. This 
singular city is a capital and an encampment in one : 
it is inhabited, at the very most, for four months in 
the year ; its buildings seem intended rather to im- 
press by their size than really to shelter creatures of 
flesh and blood ; people hardly settle down there ; 



146 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the Englishman demands less comfort, is content to 
dispense with a number of luxuries, as though he 
were afraid of forgetting home, his real home, and of 
being unfaithful to his regrets. 

The first impression on arriving, whether one 
pass through the populous suburbs near Howrah 
Station or along the majestic river with its crowded 
ships, is one of a swarming, teeming, innumerable 
crowd. You vaguely realize that figure, too huge to 
be anything but abstract, of the three hundred mil- 
lion men that live between the Himalayas and Cape 
Kumarin. You say to yourself that this wave of 
brown humanity has been ebbing and flowing from 
sea to sea of the peninsula for thousands of years, 
amid the luxuriance of as lavish a vegetation and the 
burning heat of a nature in perpetual eruption. You 
feel a sensation of enormous life, imperious and 
glorified, whose force from the beginning claimed the 
homage due to the gods, a homage which has never 
been diverted from it since. 

The houses of the capital, whether ruined hovels 
or villas with Ionic columns, are dirtied by the black 
and torrential rains of autumn. The dampness then 
becomes terrible ; the floors warp, the walls stream. 
You find mushrooms in your books -and in your 
slippers. The struggle with the elements in the 
tropics is conducted with less advantage on man's 
side than in temperate climes. Discouraged, he 
throws up the game, resigns himself, gives in to the 
phenomena of nature, ever buoyed up by the thought 
that an end will come, jthat he will see the island of 



CALCUTTA 147 

his birth again, where nature does not humble nor 
absorb the individual, but leaves him the illusion of 
his mastery, his strength and his usefulness. 



5 

I have accepted the hospitality of a captain in the 
sepoys, whose regiment has come to Calcutta for the 
festivities and is encamped on the immense Maidan, 
the esplanade of grass and trees which gives a heart 
of verdure to the city. The guns of Fort William 
only just point across their glacis in the direction of 
the town and the river. They do not jar upon the 
landscape. They dream. 

One sleeps well under the double tents, where the 
heat becomes endurable. Each officer's tent is 
finished off with a bath-room. The colonel has a 
really imposing pavilion, hung with striped stuff. On 
the mess-table are objects of art, silver cups per- 
petuating the memory of victories in the field of 
sport, an elephant, also in silver (the elephant figures 
in the regimental arms in the midst of laurels inter- 
woven with the names of victories), around which, at 
the hour of cigars, pushed from guest to guest, the 
four cut-glass decanters — port, claret, madeira and 
marsala — pass in a mystic and continuous revolu- 
tion. 

The soldiers, divided into Hindu and Moham- 
medan companies, are, for the most part, strapping 
fellows in whom hierarchical respect is increased by 
the respect of the black man for the white, of the 



148 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

subject race for the conquering race, to the extent of 
making them a sort of shadows bowing with humble, 
silent, vague movements. They come from the 
South, they are Madrassis, second-rate troops lack- 
ing the military qualities of the Rajputs or the high- 
land tribesmen. The silence, broken by an occa- 
sional bugle-call, is what strikes me above all in 
this native camp. I think of the French trooper, 
who is never still, of the songs of Pitou, the reflec- 
tions of Dumanet . . . These, on the other hand, 
chew their betel, without speaking, adore Bhairon, 
the ogre-god, or Kali with the bloody hands. " Food 
for powder," FalstafF would say. " They'll fill a pit, 
as well as better : mortal men, mortal men." 



You would do wrong to think that they make little 
of etiquette at the Court of Calcutta. It is not even 
the same thing as at a constitutional Court : the cere- 
monial of Ecbatana and Susa in the days of the 
Persian kings would come nearer to it. The story 
goes that, after Salamis, Xerxes fled in an over- 
crowded ship. The danger was pointed out to him : 
he made a mere gesture and all the courtiers leapt 
into the sea. Lord Curzon's aides-de-camp would 
obviously not hesitate in similar circumstances ; and 
this would be a great pity, for they are the 
pleasantest people in the world. Nothing, when 
all is said,^ is more logical than to surround the 
power in these lands with the necessary spells, 



GAIETIES 149 

with a pomp intended to strike the imagination of 
the crowd. 

Government House has a very grand appearance, 
with its monumental gates, its flight of steps, its 
colonnade and its scarlet guards. Inside are im- 
mense rooms, with very fine pictures and furniture 
of a century back and of an uncertain and charming 
style. After the rather austere ceremony in which 
the men file past the Viceroy, who stands and bows, 
came the Drawing-room, the ladies' day : court- 
trains and bouquets, as at Buckingham Palace. To- 
night, we dine. It is the first dinner of the season. 
Only eight guests are waiting in the drawing-room 
adorned at its four corners by four large photographs 
of earlier vicereines. 

The aides-de-camp, in smart mess-dress with sky- 
blue facings and gold buttons, and two officers of the 
body-guard, in red and gold, receive us. Lastly, 
two more appear abreast at the door, announce 
" Their Excellencies," fall back and make way for 
the august pair. He has an energetic, clean-shaven 
face, full of intelligence and self-confidence, as befits 
a theorist whom his party have done the honour 
and joy to fling him into the midst of his theories, 
saying, " Act ! " And this before he has reached his 
fortieth year, while he is in the flower of his strength 
and ambition, a remarkable example of that English 
organization in which society knows how to draw 
the maximum of effort and profit out of each indi- 
vidual. She is tall, graceful, infinitely comely and 
beautifully dressed — a white gown strewn with small 



150 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

pearls — with superb shoulders, her head poised on 
her neck in the mid-century, Winterhalter manner, 
but with such patrician elegance, as Octave Feuillet 
would say, heavy golden chestnut hair and admirable 
eyes. 

In the dining-room there is an empty throne on 
a platform behind the Viceroy : great purple flowers 
scattered over the cloth; scarlet servants behind 
each guest ; invisible music, serious-looking gold 
plate. Second Empire cooking : rich soups, supremss, 
everything excellent tor that matter. We talk of 
London, of the ball at which I first met Her Excel- 
lency, then a young debutante and the beauty of the 
season, of different people in Europe, of Paris, that 
Washington of France, and of Washington, that Paris 
of America, where the king her father had her brought 
up, like the princesses of the fairy-tales, far from all 
Chicagoes. We rise and, in the large drawing-room, 
while the band sighs forth things by Mendelssohn, 
each guest, beaten up in turn by a courteous aide- 
de-camp and driven towards the corner where the 
Viceroy is seated, enjoys a few minutes of substan- 
tial conversation. 

7 
The next day, at the races, there is a desperate 
assault of elegance. Mrs. This has sprinkled three 
extra orange rosettes on her bodice and Mrs. That 
expects to make a great hit with her magenta trim- 
mings. And you will go to your grave, perhaps, 
without having gazed upon the lace flounces of the 



GAIETIES 151 

Collectress of Barrackpur or the plume of feathers 
proudly hoisted on the summit of the hat of the 
colonel's lady of the 14th Elephant Battery, like a 
flag planted, amid the rapturous joys of victory, on a 
long-defended citadel. And how poor she looks, the 
fine lady, in the viceregal carriage and four, the car- 
riage with the bronzed postillions, in their pigskin 
breeches ; the millionaire tourists, how poor they 
look too ! And poorest-looking of all are, beside the 
carriage where the first American vicereine of the 
Indian Empire sits enthroned, the descendants of the 
emperors of Delhi, of the glorious Padishahs who 
sprang from Timur Bey, so many embarrassed, 
second-rate, resigned vassals and abolished glories. 
This lesson to be learnt from things and events is 
taken in, as she passes in her smart phaeton, by the 

beautiful L , the famous nautch-girl, who owns 

half a million's worth of jewels, dances only for 
princes and represents in Calcutta the first rank of 
what Rudyard Kipling calls " the oldest profession 
in the world." 



CHAPTER II 

CALCUTTA : THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS- 
THE SQUALID QUARTERS 



We are at the "Zoo." The band of a native regi- 
ment is playing, with movements of an exotic merri- 
ment, selections from The Shop Girl, which is coming 
into fashion in Calcutta this year. We escape to the 
back of the gardens. There are animals everywhere. 
If you do not like them, you must not come to India. 
They reign here as masters. This is the land of the 
Ramayana. All living nature feels at one here ; 
there is no inferior form of life ; the animals bring 
Rama their strength and their wisdom to help him 
to recover Sita : for the rest, those bodies are in- 
habited by the souls of the ancestors departed or the 
souls of the sons unborn. 

Then Buddha preaches the immense love of created 
things. His teachings have all the Franciscan gen- 
tleness ; his legends go beyond it. One day, he gave 
his flesh for food to a tigress whose whelps were 
hungry. In this formidable chaos of forms and 
symbols which is the Hindu religion, the animal gives 



THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 153 

its likeness to the gods, covers the temples with its 
painted or graven images, even as it mixes familiarly 
in everyday life. It is not shy : a kite snatches a 
loaf from the hands of an old woman in the open 
street ; the sparrows come in through the windows 
of the club, peck at the crumbs under the tables, 
drink the water in the finger-bowls, their feet clutch- 
ing the edge of the glass : the sparrow is Ga- 
vroche; the crow, the insupportable, shameless, 
noisy, vulgar rascal of a black and grey crow, so well 
known to all who have been to India, is Bcireau. 
The little striped squirrels, the parrakeets, the mon- 
keys run about the trees. The flamingoes and the 
cranes people the swamps, the crocodiles the rivers, 
the tiger and the elephant the deep jungle. In the 
old temples, the flying foxes hang in clusters from 
the vault, the wild bees have their combs between 
the heavy breasts of the goddesses. The snakes 
invade the houses : you must never move about with- 
out a light ; the white ants devour your clothes and 
your books. Sometimes there are mysterious mi- 
grations, sudden, irresistible bursts of life, as in 
Kattywar, where, in certain years, legions of rats 
come forth from the ground, invading and devouring 
everything on their passage. They are of an un- 
known species, red as the sand, and they disappear 
for years as mysteriously as they came. 

Everything swarms on this ardent soil : fauna, 
flora, humanity. And with what a will to live, logi- 
cally counterbalanced, among the philosophers who 
have raised themselves above mere instinct, by the 



154 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

wish for non-existence ! Seeds sprout in the bodies 
of insects ; the plant conquers the superior organism, 
kills the caterpillar, which becomes a root. And this 
fact corresponds with ten thousand others. 

No artist escapes the imperious instigation of this 
animal and vegetal world which crowds and closes 
round you on every side. After the authors of the 
Ramayana and the Sakuntala, an Englishman has 
written the poem of the jungle. Following the 
natural bent of his temperament, Rudyard Kipling 
goes for action, for energy. His two books of the 
jungle glorify it in the midst of the most fascinating 
setting. The story of the man-cub represents the 
childhood of an Anglo-Saxon Siegfried, the victory 
precisely of human ingenuity and courage over that 
overwhelming nature. In reality, the hero of the 
English novelist is a Hindu only by convention. 
The race subjected by the English was subjected 
already by the sun, by the fatalities of the air and 
the soil, of dead and living nature. It resigns itself, 
does not dream of ruling, is born, accepts and dies. 
There are real man-cubs in India, but they are 
idiots, go on all-fours, do not speak and eat only 
raw meat. 



The Chinese quarter of Calcutta, at night. A 
police-officer accompanies us. What we are under- 
taking this evening is a grand-ducal round of the 
slums of the great cosmopolitan city. First, Bentinck 
Street, the Chinese bazaar, a procession of little 



THE SQUALID QUARTERS 155 

shops full of busy yellow faces, leaning over sewing- 
machines or boot-soles until two o'clock in the 
morning almost every night, we are told: a 
laborious, pertinacious race, alarming and haunt- 
ing, which, much more than the Hindus, gives an 
impression of mystery, of profound difference from 
us, of incomprehensibility and hallucination. 

I shall never forget that gaming-house where the 
Chinese coolies crowded round the table, under the 
glimmer of a lantern hanging from the black rafters. 
There is a little altar in one corner of the room, a 
pot of ashes before unknown sacred objects, conun- 
drums, grimaces in which, according to the formula 
of these creatures, the dread divinity resides, a 
pot of ashes in which joss-sticks are stuck and slowly 
burn away. The croupier divides a heap of cowries 
with a sort of brass blade or rake. Then, with the 
aid of the same implement, he draws the white shells 
towards him, four by four, with a light and cautious 
movement. The winnings are distributed according 
as one, two or three remain. 

The players are interesting to watch : almond- 
eyed faces that smile with the lips and the eye-lids ; 
black pig-tails that hang over one shoulder with 
their tip lying on a heap of coins ; long, cruel, 
caressing fingers, the fingers of a race clever at 
exquisite crafts and ingenious tortures, fingers 
which one imagines as dexterous at scratching a 
landscape in the down of a plum with a slender nail 
as they might be at gently sawing a throat with a 
chip of bamboo to languorous music in the twilight. 



IS6 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

No Japanese mask, no netsuke lovingly carved in 
a dream of minute horror could exceed in intensity 
the expression on the face of that old man, over 
there, who thrusts out his chin, with its pointed tuft 
of beard, over the heaped-up stakes. The wrinkled 
parchment cheeks are hollow ; so are the temples ; 
the concave forehead retreats above the bristhng 
eyebrows. It is a face all of holes, from which 
the eyes shoot forth their covetous and malefic 
glance. . . . 

3 

A moment later, we cross the threshold of an 
opium-den, kept open in our honour to the great 
delight of the customers, whom a vigilant adminis- 
tration does not allow to intoxicate themselves after 
nine o'clock in the evening. For that matter, the 
aforesaid administration provides the opium itself: 
the quality would be so bad but for that guarantee, 
don't you know ? Noble-minded old ladies and well- 
meaning gentlemen are in despair at this fact, at 
home, in the native island, under the ceiling of a 
certain Exeter Hall which you will hear mentioned, 
if you come to India, and without affection, perhaps. 
It is the centre of what v^e might call English 
Berengism, the league against the licence of the 
streets and for the improvement of the heathen, the 
home of the Protestant propaganda, the manufactory 
of tracts and ingeniously-garbled bibles, the nest 
from which take flight those swarms of male and 
female missionaries who darken the skies of Africa 



THE SQUALID QUARTERS 157 

and Asia, settle down in the best places and perse- 
veringly propagate their species, assured as they are 
of a supplementary allowance for each additional 
child. 

But to return to the opium : the penetrating odour 
catches us by the throat on the threshold of the 
miserable hut where the smokers lie on beds, two by 
two, with the little lamp, under its glass shade, 
between each drunken pair. 

" It's an excellent febrifuge," says the officer who 
accompanies us. " But come and see a Hindu den." 

Here, there are no beds : the people are lying on 
the ground. A woman runs away when we come 
in. The men make a show of rising : they are ser- 
vants, workmen, the humblest of those "bold 
wooers of insanity " who, throughout the East, ask 
the formidable drug for the secret of life or its 
oblivion. 

The rest of the evening consists of kaleidoscopic 
visions that flee, return, vanish before our eyes. 
Whole streets pass bordered with great cages in 
which Japanese painted dolls, curious and deceptive 
little creatures of love, hail the passer-by with bird- 
like cries; at this door, a Hindu beauty smiles 
sweetly, as Sakuntala must have smiled to her hind ; 
further, a Viennese woman jabbers her queer 
English ; in the Moslem concert, where we sit down 
for a moment, two nautch-girls strike their anklets 
together and, with the tips of their henna-stained 
fingers, spread out, at the bottom of their gauze skirts, 
laces of silver incrusted with green beetle-wings. 



158 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

They wear a silver nail in one nostril and the carti- 
lage of their ears is pierced four-fold. ... 

And we turn back, pursued by the musty odour 
of the opium, the wail of the native instruments, the 
obsession of all that strange life and of that volup- 
tuousness which we shall never fathom and never 
measure. 



CHAPTER III 
HI-NDU INDIA— BENARES 



A Hindu writer once said that Europe was as favour- 
able a district for the study of religions as the desert 
of the Sahara for that of botany. Nothing could be 
truer. Our attitude towards the Godhead is one of 
extraordinary lack of ceremony. Religious duties 
fill only a modest place among our daily preoccupa- 
tions. The most righteous people think that they 
have discharged their tribute to the Infinite when 
they make a few mechanical and occasional gestures. 
The Hindus are more logical. Even as there is no 
comparison between the finite and infinite, neither is 
there any, for them, between the homage due to the 
one and that due to the other ; that is to say, their 
religion overflows and swallows up everything : 
material life, its passions, its very needs are deluged, 
annihilated; man remains motionless, hypnotized, 
prostrate under the Divine. 

Benares, the sacred Kasi, is perhaps the one spot 
in the world where one might fix the ideal bridge 
which man, since all time, has tried to throw into 



i6o THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the unknown, as the spider throws its thread. The 
air is thick with formidable presences, from the 
animal-gods of the crowd to the Brahma Trismegistus 
of the priest and the divine essence pursued in the 
trances of the Yoga by the dreams of the gymnoso- 
phist, further than the thresholds of language and 
further than the horizons of the abstract. 

An approaching eclipse has lately attracted num- 
berless pilgrims, thirsting for the signal merits pro- 
curable by means of a bath in the sacred river under 
the darkened disk of the moon. All the roads that 
converge towards the town are covered with a grey 
and patient crowd, carrying brass pots in its hands. 
The trains discharge a continuous stream of con- 
templative humanity. The streets swarm. The 
Ghats, the great staircases that descend to the 
Ganges, disappear under the mass of the believers 
and the rush-woven umbrellas of the priests who 
squat before the little instruments — vessels of ochre, 
spoons, spatulas and pincers — with which they 
restore the ritual marks of caste on the foreheads of 
the fervent emerging from the water. The fakirs 
smeared with ashes stare fixedly before them. 
Their number is frightful, their motives disquieting. 
None has ever been able completely to enumerate 
their sects. They are generally differentiated by the 
manner of their mortification. Here is one who has 
held his arm upstretched for the last ten years : he 
seems petrified in the obstinate attitude of a harbinger, 
or does he point with a dead finger to the empty 
sky ? The limb is ankylosed, will never be lowered 



HINDU INDIA i6t 

again : the man will die thus and his stiff arm will 
stick out hideously beyond the edge of the funeral 
pile. Here is another, a very old man, meditating 
between a little chela, or disciple, ten years old, per- 
haps, and already smeared with ashes, and a familiar 
mouse, which pushes its snout between the bars of 
its cage. A third, with clenched fist, shows his nails, 
which have pierced his palm in their slow growth 
and now appear through the back of his hand. Yet 
another, lying on his back, with a little earth on his 
upper lip, has been waiting for three days and three 
nights in the open air, without moving or eating, for 
a mustard-seed laid on that pinch of earth to sprout 
in the warmth of his flesh. What are the motives of 
these actions ? They cannot be explained according 
to our logic. Though we may conceive Buddha 
endeavouring to annihilate desire by the suppression 
of the body and the subjection of its exigencies, or 
Christian asceticism offering up its sufferings for the 
salvation of sinners, we remain stupid in the presence 
of these men. Perhaps they ask of pain the absolute 
which others have sought in pleasure. Are they 
horrible idiots or so many more proud men, like the 
stylite in Thais, haunted in their narrow brains by 
barbarous "records?" They are something of all 
this, no doubt, with varied proportions weighed in 
other scales than those in which we measure facts 
and ideas. 



1 62 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



Everything escapes our understanding in this 
country; our paltry laws, our minute conceptions 
of good and evil all fly into fragments before the 
onrush of disordered phenomena. We go to see an 
old Yogi sitting quite naked in a garden of roses. 
His reputation for holiness stretches from one end 
of India to the other ; his statues, in the meditative 
attitude of Buddha, are found in the palaces of kings 
and in the traders' shops ; in fact, the title which the 
veneration of the faithful bestows upon him is that of 
Swamt, which means God. He distributes pamphlets, 
describing his life and miracles, to the visitors. One 
contains a double text, in Sanskrit and English, to- 
gether with ideas which one would swear to be 
German and which, nevertheless, belong to the 
oldest system of metaphysics in the world, that in 
which the sage has sought a refuge not only for his 
thought, but for his activity, his very totality. One 
evening, on the bank of the sacred Ganges, at 
Hardwar, the spot where the river falls from the 
forehead of the Himalaya (which is Siva) " like a 
necklace of pearls of which the thread is broken," 
the ascetic flung into the river the kupm, the rag of 
stuff which was his last garment and his last earthly 
possession. This was on his return from long pil- 
grimages across the whole of India, from Behar to 
Deccan. He had visited the four Dhams and the 
seven Puris. He had passed through every initiation, 



HINDU INDIA 163 

His wife, married in her twelfth year, his son, dead 
at the same age, he had left behind him on the 
way. The attribute of action in the human mind, the 
Rajas, he had annihilated : it is the first bandage 
which illusion binds over our eyes. Then he had 
understood — more than the understandable — foiled 
Maya, realized the supreme correspondences. The 
absolute to which he had brought not only his 
thought, but also his whole life, along the road of 
his sacrificed senses, now opened up to him those 
ecstasies which human words have never been able 
to describe. 

3 

We find him talking with little Madame de B 



looking so amusing in her tailor-made flannel dress 
and her man's hat (notwithstanding the Indian sun, 

she refuses to wear a helmet). Madame de B 

is travelling about ; they told her at the hotel that 
the holy man was one of the curiosities of the place ; 
besides, he lives quite near the Monkey Temple, 
which you have got to see, and she will take Gopi Nat's 
shop on her way back : she will have done the shop, 
the monkeys and the holy man on the same morning. 
The mahatma — he has put on a light apron — is 
sitting cross-legged under a columned kiosk, with 

Madame de B beside him, the handle of her 

sunshade, which is the head of a rabbit in ebony, 
lying on an open commentary of the Vedas, whose 
pages are fluttered by the cool breeze. At their 
feet squat disciples and the hotel guide. Around 



1 64 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

are roses, a murmuring of slow water, the trees of a 
Hindu garden, sacred monkeys on the coping oi 
the walls. The old man comes towards us, takes 
our hands with a charming movement and makes us 

sit down by Madame de B . He has the dead 

amber skin of his caste, the iBrahmans, a very 
refined and very gentle expression and the most 
delicately eager manners. He is really "a dear 

old thing " as Miss D , the charming daughter of 

our friend the Commissary of the Thuggee and 
Dacoity Department, declared that evening. 

A disciple hands us the list of visitors, printed at 
the end of the biography of the Swami, who, with a 
thin finger and a kindly smile, shows us the word 
" France." Next, for want of an easier method of 
intellectual communication, he begins to tell or 
rather to chant to us a verse of Sanskrit. I listen 
to the bell-like, sonorous tones of the ancestral 
tongue, " more delicious than the fruit of the mango- 
tree," a young Hindu poet said to me the other day, 
"for in the mango there is a stone and Sanskrit 
is all sweetness." I read the sense of those bronze 
syllables in the English translation : 

"There exists no absolute nor absence of the 
absolute in the Ego, for no element distinct from 
the Ego has ever been known." 

" That's Kant," saj^'S some one, pretentiously. 

Madame de B— — is evidently thinking of her 
menus of the coming winter. 

The roses send forth their fragrance. 

We take our leave. 



HINDU INDIA 165 



4 

My friend went back again to see the holy man 
with an interpreter. He had the fixed idea of 
tempting that soHtary, as he said. But the solitary 
was not in the humour to talk philosophy and his 
mistaken interlocutor assured me that he produced 
upon himself the effect of a tedious old professor 
boring a little boy that wanted to play. Finally, 
the Swami took his hand, made him sit down on 
the ground beside him and the young Rajah of 
T photographed the two together. 

We had as our professor of mathematics an old 
Jesuit who had invented a theory of gravitation and 
who used to play ball, like a little romp of a girl, 
during recreation. Now that I think of it, the 
Swami resembles him in face and perhaps in soul. 
Or is he simply a Francis of Assisi, an artless mind 
and a consoling presence ? . . . 



5 

What a curious country is this : close by the 
Garden of Wisdom, in a red temple, they were 
sacrificing a goat to the cruel goddess Durga, amid 
the yells of hundreds of monkeys on the walls, the 
domes, the staffs of the gilt, triangular ensigns. A 
mother, with her young clutched to her stomach, 
swings, head downwards, from the chased bronze 
bell. An aggressive old monkey shakes his fist at 



1 66 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

us, chatters with his jaws and, with a bound, leaps 
on another cupola of maize-spikes, under which the 
Goddess of Bad Dreams awaits the offerings of those 
who have killed sleep. It is a sanctuary of the 
second rank in the shadow of the greater terror. I 
give two annas to the priest : the priest of the 
Goddess of Bad Dreams. ... 



We return for one last visit to the Golden Temple, 
the Holy of Holies of the Holy City, through the 
narrow streets, the displays of idols, lingams and 
love-charms. Little by little, the atmosphere of 
unbounded fervour, the permanent exaltation of that 
human crowd towards the divine horde at which it 
flings its adjurations and its prayers, the ecstasy of 
those naked beggars, of those pilgrims absorbed in 
the most minute religion that exists : all takes hold 
of you, fills you with a sort of hallucinatory uneasi- 
ness. From the sides of the columns, in the shadow 
of the eaves lean images of musical apsaras in atti- 
tudes of distraught flight, reminding one of Gothic 
gargoyles. A great bull in red stone stands there, 
the emblem of Siva the creator. Around it turn 
worshippers, with brass vessels in their hands, 
priests, whose hard faces make me think of the 
canons of Toledo in a fine book by M. Leon Daudet, 
and supine cows munching flowers. 

You slip in water, mud, on fresh leaves. A woman 
devoutly sprinkles with lustral water a sandstone 



BENARES 167 

lingam crowned with a marigold. Another implores 
some favour of the planet Saturn, personified by a 
shapeless image. Gongs, conchs and, in an outer 
gallery, enormous drums burst forth at intervals, 
filling everything with an ardent and painful vibra- 
tion. Heavy miasmas rise from the famous Well of 
Knowledge, where the god resides amid the decay- 
ing rubbish of countless vegetable offerings. This 
odour of death and fermentation together issuing 
from the Well of Knowledge is an alarming symbol. 
And in the blue sky stand the gold-cased domes 
where numberless parrakeets pair ; and their flight 
traces a flash through the blue from the holy temple 
to the profane minarets of Aurungzeb's mosque, 
rigid, threatening, proud and faithful. 

At the ghat at the foot of the temple, we embark 
on the Ganges. The river, on the left bank, washes 
a front of palaces and temples many miles in length 
and the steps of innumerable monumental stairways. 
The most excellent of pious works consists in build- 
ing a dwelling or a sanctuary on that sacred bank 
whence the soul flies straight to the creative essence 
and the bosom of Buddha. The other bank, quite 
bare, carries a curse : who dies there is sure of 
being reborn under the grievous shape of a donkey. 

We go up the stream in one of those large, lazy 
boats surmounted by terraces filled with seats, in 
which families live and die, rocked by the divine 
current. The boatmen regulate their strokes to 
the rhythm of an invocation of the river, " Mother 
GangeSj" whose mere name is sanctifying, a prayer 



1 68 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

as old as the river itself, with a refrain — " Gatiga 
dja'i ! Victory to Ganges " ! — which ends in a gut- 
tural sound, untranslatable into our articulate lan- 
guage, a spasmodic han ! that resembles nothing 
else and gives sudden and mysterious impressions of 
different forms of humanity. Next, borne on that 
never yet heard harmony, the holy city passes 
slowly before us, the mysteries of the ages, 
tenebrous idols, proud palaces, all the apparatus 
that masks the impenetrable soul of this land. 

Dogs, fat tortoises in the water, flames around 
funeral piles, stiff outlines showing through wet 
cloths that mould the corpses, silent kinsmen. . . . 
They burn the dead here. The ashes are for the 
river. As the poor have not the means to buy a first- 
rate pile and as the domra, a member of an infamous 
caste which alone has the right to supply the neces- 
sary wood, charges very dear for it, the poor go 
down the river very indifferently burnt. The fat 
tortoises know it. And thousands of men bathe 
daily in the Ganges and drink its water without a 
qualm. This appears abominable to our European 
feelings of delicacy. But what a much broader 
consciousness it shows of life in death, of the 
universal circulus^ of the one substance ! 



7 

Further on, down a ghat with disjointed steps a 
temple has slipped into the water. Columns and 
carvings appear above the surface, fakir stylites lift 



BENARES 169 

their grey bodies and, at their feet, the eternal mari- 
golds whirl round in an eddy. And, above the con- 
fused heap of wherries, of bamboo platforms, of men 
and women, of polished and gleaming libatory vessels, 
above the naked torsos with a strip of stuff wound 
round them, above the dogs wandering about the 
steps, above the prostrate faithful, there reigns a 
mad efflorescence of straw sunshades, of every 
shade of yellow, planted at every angle, some like 
golden mushrooms over stalls, others flat against the 
side of a porch, like votive shields. All this is 
overtowered by the peculiar domes, with bell-turrets 
glued to the central cone, springing, so to speak, one 
from the other, like flames, like the petals of a 
flower, of unknown origin, an architectural riddle 
unsolved to this day. 

Then, palaces follow upon one another, built by 
all the princes of Hindustan. I notice that of the 
Rajah of Indore, with its painted balconies and its 
roof resting on a quaint, almost Louis XV flowered 
cornice, and that of the Maharana of Oodeypore, the 
premier Indian monarch, whose house displays the 
proud elegance of the Rajput monuments, with its 
gate between the two sloping towers, with pointed 
battlements. 

More flights of steps and terraces, all swarming 
with crowds ; an observatory opening graceful 
miradors over the river and full of huge instruments 
of unknown uses ; houses between which, in a dark, 
climbing street, a group of women in bright-coloured 
saris disappear helter-skelter: we just catch a glimpse 



i7o THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of the sight, one of unforgotten picturesqueness ; 
grey monkeys and blue pigeons fighting for the corn 
between the emaciated feet of a motionless ascetic ; 
a wrestler practising before an image of Hanuman 
(the Hercules, the St. Christopher of Hindu myth- 
ology) and lifting a mill-stone in the shape of a 
crown ; a thousand ever-changing, ever-renewed 
visions under the setting sun which purples all 
things ; the perturbing effluvia rising from the edge 
of the water itself : charred flesh, aromatics, smells 
of cinnamon, of dying flowers and stables ; and al- 
ways the obsessing " Ganga, Ganga djdi ! " a spas- 
modic cry which now sounds like a death-rattle, 
while a phrase of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam recurs to 
my mind before the magnificence of the twilight and 
I think of that "evening in the earliest ages" when 
"the death of the star Surya, the phcenix of the 
worlds, tore millions of sparks from the golden domes 
of Benares." 



CHAPTER IV 

IN RAJPUTANA— JEYPORE 



In the evening — what a contrast ! — we dine with an 
amiable English official, at ten miles' distance from 
the native city. Every town, important or not, in 
modern India consists of a native quarter and an 
European " cantonment : " the latter is removed as 
far as possible from the other and formed of houses 
known as bungalows, surrounded by immense gar- 
dens known as compounds and scattered at great 
distances which make communication impossible on 
foot. 

After dinner, a lady played the banjo, another 
sang, then another. They sang two of those 
appalHng English songs, vulgar without being 
simple, commonplace without being ingenuous, 
utterly devoid of sincerity without, neverthe- 
less, displaying any amusing touch of fancy 
or the least dash of art, works by bad makers 
prepared in the worst Italian moulds without pre- 
serving the original accent. Average people, in 
England, sing or listen to them promiscuously with 



172 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

their beautiful old popular melodies, with the best 
songs of Gounod, of Mademoiselle Chaminade, of 
Signor Tosti (a knowing one, he, settled in London, 
in the middle of the market) and with the tunes in 
their last musical comedies, which, for that matter, 
are often charming and, at least, reveal some origi- 
nality and a personal grace. But they make po 
attempt, these extraordinary people, to discriminate 
between the worst and the best : it is all absolutely 
alike to them ! One ends by asking one's self. By 
virtue of what mysterious law do they think them- 
selves, at certain moments of the day (generally 
after the evening meal) obliged to sit down in front 
of a piano and to emit irregularly-spaced i sounds 
with the look of people who would rather be some- 
where else ? 

" I have it," cries my friend, whom this riddle is 
beginning to irritate, " I have it ! It's another case 
of sport ! They do not sing to express something, 
the trouble at their heart or the aspirations in their 
soul : they delight in a difficulty overcome, in the 
exercise of their lungs. A note is a thing which you 
catch, like a ball. Do you take them for play-actors, 
that you ask them to exhibit sentiment ? That is 
not manly for a man nor decent for a woman. There 
are things which one doesn't show in public. But 
the agility of one's gullet, the vigour of one's 
bronchial tubes are proofs of a sound constitution 
for which one is entitled to claim respect and the 
musical composers are there to assist you. Besides, 
it's always done after dinner, like dressing before or 



IN RAJPUTANA 173 

drinking port at the end. And then, what could they 
do instead ? It's a function : there you are I Their 
pleasures are all functions ! " 

I considered that my philosopher was more or less 
right. It is the idea of sport which,, to these men, 
secretly dignifies the practice of art. In the eyes of 
some, this idea is not even sufficient. How instruc- 
tive is the story of that young subaltern, an acquaint- 
ance of an English friend of mine, who, on being 
transferred from the dragoons to a regiment of 
hussars, became the object of a thousand persecu- 
tions, first, because he was too heavy for polo and, 
next, because he played the violin. They thought 
that an officer was degraded by " scraping the 
bowels of a cat," to use the formula which, in the 
British cavalry, expresses the art of Paganini. It is 
a very interesting, but, above all, an admirably 
logical fact. A soldier has no business to play the 
violin and those young fellows made themselves the 
equals of the most subtle analysts by their prompt and 
definite notion of the duties and seemliness of their 
calling. There is much to be expected from an 
army which is so little inclined to allow itself to be 
distracted by outside futilities. Needs must one 
raise one's hat to it, respectfully. 



The decolletage of the Rajput women takes an 
original form. It is upside down. The corslet of 
stuff that imprisons the breasts stops suddenly 



174 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

underneath and the rest of the upper part of the 
body appears bare through the symmetrical folds of 
the sari. . . . 

Such visions accompany me through the streets 
of the astounding and magic city of Jeypore, 
the pink town, the mad town, built by a Neronian 
astronomer, the great Jey Sing, which, later, under 
the reign of the most fantastic of tyrants, beheldthe 
apotheosis of the immortal Ras Caphoor, a Moslem 
dancer who was madly loved by the king and whose 
name means Corrosive Sublimate. She was everything 
in the State ; she used Jey Sing's algebraical manu- 
scripts for curl-papers; and, when her lover was 
deposed and separated from her and cloistered in 
his palace, he had storey built upon storey, terrace 
upon terrace, up into the clouds, a wild, mad edifice 
from the top of which, perhaps, he might hope to 
see the prison of the well-beloved. What would one 
not give to find one of those coins which — an un- 
paralleled fact — the king had struck with the con- 
cubine's effigy, a delicate and perfect monument of 
intoxicated despotism, a bewitching idea on the part 
of an ironical tyrant and, for the woman, a triumph 
equal to that of the conqueror, a satisfaction beside 
which none other could appear enviable to her. 

Wander through those wide streets, those salmon- 
coloured houses, those ramparts painted with great 
flowers, those palace-yards with their frescoes of 
frenzied gods, those gardens, those squares where 
the Rajput horseman rides past on his stallion with 
the gaudy trappings, his curved tulwar at his side 



JEYPORE 175 

(here, everybody carries arms), his beard parted and 
plastered down on either cheek, an aigrette of 
precious stones on his forehead. He loves opium, 
hunting, beautiful swords and beautiful women. He 
keeps his sworn word and the boast of a wonderful 
past. No Iliad but pales beside the stories of love 
and death that go to make up the annals of the 
Rajasthan. And this proud and loyal people is just 
simply the last aristocracy (I mean with strict war- 
ranties of purity of blood), the last aristocracy left 
on earth. 

Here, up this lane is a quail-fight : heavy wagers 
are laid. A huntsman stops his walk with the leather- 
masked cheetah which he is leading in a leash, in 
order to follow the catastrophes of the contest. Near 
the cages in which the hunting-lynxes are kept, a 
falconer stands with a gerfalcon on his wrist : it 
wears no hood, but its lids are sewn together with a 
thread. An elephant, its tusks hooped with gold, 
passes amid the waving of delicately-tinted draperies 
that flap against its rugose flanks. A collar of silver 
plates jingles round its neck as it comes through a 
crushed-strawberry gate with white turrets cut out 
against the crude sky in a proud and graceful outline. 
There is a diapered grace over all these things, a 
delicate, heroic and light gaiety. Domes fly up, 
like bubbles, from the top of an unreal building that 
springs from the ground and spreads out in the 
happy light like a mad convolvulus. It is the Hall 
of the Winds : the diaphanous and fleeting air plays 
at its ease amid this fairy palace, half cloud and half 



176 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

flower. The Hall of the Winds — the name is all- 
sufficient — answers so well to what one expected in 
this Jeypore of unforeseen and gallant poetry : one 
of the beautiful things of the East, set amid its courts 
full of gigantic instruments — gnomons, sun-dials, 
quadrants — with which Jey Sing, the illustrious 
mathematician, despot, drunkard and murderer, 
observed in the sky the fickle star and the belve- 
deres of florid marble where the marvellous Corrosive 
Sublimate languished a prisoner. And this is more 
or less the impression that remains of Jeypore the 
unforgettable : a star-gazer's dream touched up by a 
dancing-girl. 

3 

The crocodiles in the pond of the royal park are 
fed at five o'clock. 

It is at the end of the large Persian garden, which 
is formal and charming with its coloured-marble 
walks, its canals of running water, its tulips and its 
pomegranates, amid the eternal sound of the grating 
water-wheels, so familiar in the East. To satisfy 
our European senses nothing is wanting but a little 
grass under the trees, for the ground at their feet is 
all mud and the English lawn is a thing which neither 
the poets nor the lovers of these torrid skies have 
ever known. 

On the lower steps of a stairway that runs down 
to the lake, a man utters a strange call. And, soon, 
eight scaly snouts appear above the water: they 
come from the three banks and each forms the top 



JEYPORE 177 

of an angle, an angle of two diverging ripples of 
water. The Hindu teases the monsters with a bit 
of gristle at the end of a string. Great jaws open, 
show their whitey depths, the throat obstructed by 
a valvular glottis. The small eye gleams under the 
rocky ej'e-lid. One of the brutes climbs a step, 
almost snaps off the man's foot : he escapes with a 
jump and hits the snub nose with his stick. I do 
the same with the end of my cane. And yet they 
are sacred beasts : but the gods are passing ! 

And, slowly, the royal alligators swim back to the 
muddy banks and the stone ledges of the islands* 
They are dreaming, perhaps, of the palmy days of 
the race of the Kuchwahas, their masters, and of the 
nights of love and murder when, sometimes, the gift 
of a sultana would reach them, with a great scream, 
through the windows of the riverside zenana. 

And the long ripples fill with stars on the twilit 
water, over which flutter the frightened water-fowl. 



M 



CHAPTER V 

MOSLEM INDIA— OLD DELHI 



Islam has no doubt seen its best days. It had 
begun to die under its motionless standards. Its 
law of eternal adventure, founded on the nomadic 
instincts of its first adherents, admirably exploited 
and stimulated by the Prophet, made movement a 
vital necessity to it. It was a prodigious engine of 
war, which repose was bound to rust and which now 
still raises its tragic, but no longer threatening 
outline. 

The invasions had their stages at which, after the 
sacred fatigues of victory, the conquerors founded an 
empire and a civilization. Those stages were Bagdad, 
Constantinople, Granada, Delhi. There, amid the 
sumptuous leisures of power, amid the almost divine 
spells with which they were girt about, amid the 
very dangers that doubled the value of the brief 
hour, amid whims anticipated and passions gratified, 
the Moslem emperors realized a few superlative forms 
of pride and voluptuousness. It is especially at the 
two extremities of Islam, in Spain and India, that 



MOSLEM INDIA i79 

we find the monumental evidences still remaining of 
a greatness consecrated and absolved by works of 
beauty. ^ The Alhambra at Granada and the Taj at 
Agra fix the Moslem genius, at that exquisite date at 
which it becomes conscious of itself, that is to say, 
begins to doubt, feels its faith grow feebler and stoops 
to clasp life with all the transport of afQicting passion. 
Before that, the mosque, the minar, the gate of vic- 
tory had proclaimed the creed and the pride of the 
ancestors in such architectural marvels as the Giralda 
at Seville, the Kutb Minar at Delhi or the triumphal 
arch of Fatehpur-Sikri. 

India displays an unequalled wealth of monuments 
of Moslem architecture at every period. The lack of 
originality frequently ascribed to them, as, in particu- 
lar, by M. Maurice Maindron in his remarkable work, 
LArt indien^ may be regarded as an additional attrac- 
tion. Three races touch one another in this complex 
art : the Arabs, the Persians and the Hindus. What 
could be more striking than this contact taken by 
the pick of human groups till then foreign to one 
another and taken in the emol^ion and expression of 
beauty, especially when that emotion is rendered in 
definite works ? One feels something similar on 
seeing an ornamental motive of the Renascence out- 
lined among the incrustations of the Taj, or the 
immortal acanthus-leaf flourishing on a capital dug 
up in the north of the Punjab : an artistic sensation 
of the purest order, for there is thought mingled with 
it. We here dimly divine humanity preparing for 
future peace, for the days of reciprocal intelligence 



i8o THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

which we must dream of while awaiting the coming 
of love ; we here foresee beauty working prodigies 
by bringing together, first, the elect and, then, the 
crowd ; here, noble perspectives undulate towards 
the infinite. 

Michelet understands something of the same kind 
when he writes, in La Bible de Vhumanite, at the end 
of the story of Firdusi, the great Persian national 
poet, honoured and then disowned by Mahmud of 
Ghazni, the first Moslem conqueror of India : 

" Is this a digression ? A thoughtless reader 
might be tempted to say so, whereas, on the contrary, 
it is the esbence of the subject, its soul. This soul 
of Persia . . . stubbornly returns, three thousand 
years after Zoroaster, and, against all expectation, 
freshens the Moslem spirit and inundates it with its 
rich goodness and its fertile inspiration." 

What would he not have added in the presence of 
this union of the ancestral Aryan soul and young 
Islam, a union wrought in the deep womb of 
Hinduism, dignified by its secular gravity and its 
metaphysical mystery, manifested in spirit and in 
monuments, under the most complete form, in the 
generous eclecticism of an Akbar ! 

We know but very little those works ot a vanished 
art, comparable with the most beautiful of the West 
and having, besides, the mystery of the foreign soul 
that is theirs. The races of men have as yet nothing 
really in common save their fatalities. There is here 



MOSLEM INDIA i8r 

the revelation of a new beauty, of an ideal very 
different from our Greek ideal, fed on other sources, 
accessible, nevertheless, in a certain measure, to our 
imagination, because of the Aryan influences which 
it has undergone and of its common Semitic origin 
with that of the religious system of which the 
morality remains ours, if not the dogma : the Tura- 
nian ideal, we might venture to say, stimulated by 
Arab genius and penetrated with that of Iran. 



The Moslem invasion was effected at the beginning, 
in the first impetuous dash, by the shortest way, the 
sea. Fifteen years after the death of the Prophet, 
the first Mohammedans set loot on the coast of 
Bombay. In 1193, Muhammed, of the house of 
Ghor, in Afghanistan, swept down upon Delhi and 
Ajmere, under cover of dissensions among the Rajput 
chiefs, and took possession of them. He established 
as his viceroy at Delhi one of his lieutenants, Kutb- 
ud-din, by birth a slave, who, on the death of his 
master, proclaimed himself sovereign of Hindustan, 
Soon after the conquest there sprang from the soil 
the mosque of Kutb'ul Islam, that of Ajmere and. 
probably, the monument that expresses better than 
any in the world ,the pride and intoxication of 
victory, the Kutb Minar. 

This triumphal tower, 240 feet high, whose name 
recalls that of its founder and also means North 
Star, rises at the outer angle of the Mosque of 



1 82 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Kutb'ul Islam, on the very site of the Hindu town of 
King Rai Pithora, which was pitilessly razed to the 
ground by the victors. Its beauty, its fascination, 
its appearance of having been built to bear the 
trophies of an unperishable dominion have caused 
it to be claimed by the Hindus. There is a 
legend which pretends that Rai Pithora built it 
that his daughter might see the Jumna from the 
top of it. There is nothing to corroborate this 
supposition. I have visited the tower of Chitor, 
which is the most famous of the similar monu- 
ments built by the Hindus. Erected at an interval 
of two centuries from each other, granting that 
they were the work of the same race, the Rajputs, 
they ought to bear the impress of a common 
genius. Now, while the one, sculptured from foot to 
summit, lingers and dallies with pompous balconies, 
with entwined gods, bursts into blossom, teems, 
swarms, a marvel of chivalrous and careless grace, 
the Moslem minar soars on high in a stern 
and ardent flight, tense, obstinate and passionate. 
Its five balconies do not break its pure lines of 
pink and amber sandstone melting up towards 
the blue sky, but each, on the contrary, seems 
the stage of a new flight. The ornamentation, 
which is irreproachable and perfect, because destined 
for God, is sober, for the believer has no time to 
spare : the whole universe does not yet confess 
the greatness of the One Allah. In a word, the 
inspiration of the Kutb seems purely Moslem and it 
is nonsense (or the refinement of a somewhat 



OLD DELHI 183 

weary aesthete) to suppose that this virile pedestal 
was intended only to carry in mid-sky the languors 
of a princess oppressed by the summer heat. 

The minar owes its admirable lightness to the 
convex flutes, alternately circular and angular, 
which mould it up to the top of the third storey. 
From there, the tower tapers up as a cylinder of 
white marble, interrupted by a penultimate balcony. 
The ordering and the contrast of the hollows and 
reliefs, the play of the light and shade accentuating 
the sharp corners, gliding over the round surface, 
filling up the empty spaces : everything gives the 
impression of an incomparable artistic success. 
Green parrakeets wheel round on a background of 
pale-red stone and white sky. Between the bal- 
conies, belts bearing heroic and religious inscrip- 
tions circle the tower like the hoops of a piece of 
ordnance. The tall Cufic characters seem to 
trace their formulas in yatagan-blades and one 
recognizes in what they proclaim the language 
which those stones were meant to hold. The sacred 
suras of the Koran alternate with the grandiloquence 
of commemorative words. The victor calls himself 
" the ally of the Amir-ul-Momenin " (the caliph of 
Bagdad). They mention the Kaaba, the Mosque of 
El Aksa at Jerusalem, which profanes the very spot 
where the Temple of Solomon stood, and one 
suddenly understands the prodigious unity in which 
the might of Islam confirms itself. Then, as they 
hover higher above the ground, the inscriptions 
become exalted, the voices sound more threatening 



1 84 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

in the purer air, pride becomes intoxicated as the 
horizon recedes : 

" Hail ! . . . Shadow of God ! . . . Thy foot 
on the neck of the nations! . . . Firmament of 
the Faith of the Pure ! . . ." 



3 
From the top, one discovers an extraordinary 
view. Sixty square miles of ground are almost 
hidden under ruins. What is the desolation of the 
Roman Campagna beside this ? In this plain, like 
the capricious river that here so often changed its 
bed, the ebb and flow of humanity has rolled in con- 
fusion. Thirteen cities — it is possible to count 
fifteen — sleep there, some under a ruined fort, others 
under shapeless stones, a strip of friable earth, 
where the greedy grass shoots between the pot- 
sherds: Indraprastha, Dilli, Lalkot, Rai, Pithora, 
Kilogheri, Siri, Tughlakabad, Ferozabad, Khyzra- 
bad, Mubarakabad, Sher Gahr, Shah Jehanabad, on 
the west of which stretches modern Delhi ! Here 
the sons of the races descended from the moon 
fought the epic battles of the Mahabharata, at the time 
of Nineveh and the Exodus. The skulls of seventy- 
five thousand enemies were walled up in the founda- 
tions of this citadel. At our feet, Timur Bey, for 
three days, massacred the conquered before the 
black banner that still rests at Samarkand, under 
the blue dome where sleeps the murderer of seven- 
teen million men. Here is the tomb of his descen- 



OLD DELHI 185 

dant, the Emperor Humayun, who died while 
seeking in the sky a lucky star ; that of the old 
prophet Nizam-ud-din, who founded the homicidal 
brotherhood of the Thugs, next to that of the poet 
Khusrau, " the parrot of Hindustan," before whom 
the nautchnis still come to scatter flowers and dance. 
There is not a spot in the world whence more 
human passion has lifted its voice to death. On 
certain days, a scorching wind raises a reddish 
cloud on the horizon, the dust of empires, one 
would say, through which one almost spies the lances 
of marching armies. The Jumna shimmers around its 
sand-banks, behind the terrifying mass of Tughla- 
kabad. On the north, the red sandstone towers of 
Delhi Fort blossom into marble pavilions. And, 
leaping with an exultant bound towards the steel- 
grey sky, the tower of Kutb-ud-din, amid its proud 
inscriptions, mounts towards the sun. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE MOSQUE OF KUTB'UL ISLAM— THE RUINS 
OF TUGHLAKABAD 



The Mosque oi Kutb'ul Islam, which at one time 
contained the minar within its walls, is the oldest of 
the Indian mosques. Time and destruction have left 
only its wonderful remains. They stand round the 
famous Iron Pillar, in which the victor seemed to see 
and consecrate a mysterious beacon of future con- 
quests. No doubt, that column of massive metal, 
twenty-two feet high and covered with unknown 
characters, was already, much earlier, a venerable 
riddle. It was protected by legends which, despite 
their heterodox nature, were bound to impress a man 
of the East. It was narrated that the sacred pillar 
pierced the head of Saher Naga, the serpent-king, 
whose convulsions, if he were set free, would shake 
the earth. The Nagas, divinities half men and half 
snakes, belong to the oldest aboriginal traditions ; I 
have assisted at the rites which are still celebrated 
on the banks of the sources of Kashmir, their 
last retreats. Even so, the cult of the nymphs did 



THE MOSQUE OF KUTB'UL ISLAM 187 

not disappear from Christian countries until the 
middle ages. The Moslem, doubtless dreading some 
formidable jinn, respected the Iron Pillar and made 
it the centre of the court of his mosque, while 
around it twenty-seven idolatrous temples were 
destroyed before giving their columns to the liwdn 
of the new sanctuary. 

The inscriptions on the pillar have been deciphered, 
but have only made the mystery yet more remote. 
The obscure words display the names of fabulous 
kings. But it is ever the same lyricism trusting in 
the memory of men and vigilant eternity. Who is 
that prince " who, having swum across the seven 
mouths of the Sindhu (Indus), defeated the Balhikas 
in battle, the breezes of whose prowess still waft 
incense to the South Sea ? " No one knows. Erudi- 
tion stammers barbaric syllables. The rest has 
perished. 

The original mosque presented the majestic and 
simple plan of the first Moslem buildings of this 
kind : a rectangular court, closed by columned gal- 
leries ; a fountain in the middle, in memory of the 
sacred well of the Kaaba, where Ismail's thirst was 
slaked ; ' in the middle of the west wall, in the direc- 
tion of Mecca, the mihrab, the empty, the eloquently 
empty niche, so wonderfully expressive of mystery 
and abstraction, towards which the faithful turn and 
which makes of each mosque, in those true words of 
M. Albert Gayet, " however far removed it be, the 
vestibule of one only temple. ''.J 

The glory of the mosque is the magnificent line ol 



1 88 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

arches that formed for it a sort of colossal rood-loft. 
A central arch, over fifty feet high, flanked on either 
side by two smaller ones, first lifted its proud ogive 
opposite the mihrab. Altamsh repeated the motive 
again to the left and right, in this way constructing a 
sort of screen pierced by thrice five openings, the 
effect of which — a purely showy effect, for the 
screen supported nothing and stood considerably 
higher than the roof of the liwdns — must have been 
to represent the extraordinary mass of a triumphal 
arch of fifteen bays straddling over the court-yard 
and the cloisters. Only the central portion still 
remains. A tracery of delicate sculptures covers the 
front and winds behind the Arab characters in the 
grace at once luxuriant and orderly of its floral 
fantasy. 

A more profound study would no doubt reveal the 
Hindu origin of theimotives that peep out through 
the sacred texts. Already we have India, immense, 
irreducible, pressing against the bars of her new 
gaol. The frailer Coptic art, after giving its elements 
to Arab art in Egypt, took pleasure and rested in the 
luminous precision of the horizons, once the inspirers 
of the pylons and terraces of Memphis and Thebes, 
as in the dryness of the air and the unchangeable 
return of the phenomena of nature : it attained its 
highest consciousness here ; but no dogma, no tradi- 
tion can ever prevail against India, with her innu- 
merable gods, those interlaced forms which reappear, 
which teem, which rave, an Olympus of the jungle, 
a frantic, impatient life, overflowing on every side, 



THE RUINS OF TUGHLAKABAD 189 

horrible, admirable, ever inordinate ; India who, 
instead of fruitful sands or nutrient mud, flings 
into the ocean her rotting and prodigal deltas, too 
fluid, too restless, full of roaring vigour and un- 
controllable energy. 



I have mentioned the House of Tughlak. Its 
old citadel, to the south-west of the Kutb, lies out- 
side the visitor's route. Few travellers know it. 
Nevertheless, no other ruin in the world, perhaps, 
is able to communicate a mightier sensation. Here, 
briefly, is its story. 

In 1320, Ghyas-ud-din Tughlak, a Turcoman 
slave who had become governor of the Punjab, 
overthrew the Hindu renegade who had succeeded 
to the throne of 'Ala-ud-din. In two years, we are 
told, he built the fort of Tughlakabad, a regular city, 
which was inspired by the entrenched camps where, 
in their native steppes, his nomadic ancestors were 
used to shelter their herds and their women, camps 
afterwards reproduced by the Mogul emperors in 
the forts of Agra and Delhi. 

His son, Muhammad bin Tughlak, on his return 
from an expedition into Bengal, gave him a review 
and, as the elephants passed, the craftily-contrived 
platform on which the old king stood gave way and 
buried him under its joists. The parricide, on 
mounting the throne, realized one of the most 
finished types of tyrants known to history. Cult- 
ured, artistic, religious and temperate, he gives the 



igo THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

impression not of a brute, a Commodus, but of a 
more manly Nero. Ibn Batuta tells of his love of 
making presents and shedding blood. His cruelty 
was less of a sport than an art. For the rest, his 
Caesarean caprices knew no bounds. He ordered 
all the people of Delhi, under pain of death, to 
migrate to Dogiri, eight hundred miles away. 
Thousands of men perished of famine and the 
undertaking came to nothing. He sent an army 
of a hundred thousand soldiers against China, 
one hundred thousand men of whom not one re- 
crossed the gorges of the Himalayas. The taxes 
were increased ten-fold ; a rebellious general was 
flayed alive, another trampled to death by elephants. 
Villagers took to the jungle, became brigands. 
During this time, the monarch went man-hunting 
for sheer love of the sport, accompanied by whole 
armies to act as beaters, slaughtered the populations 
of great cities, restoring the degenerate pleasures of 
the chase to their first, logical form. It is stated 
that, on the death of him who is still called the 
Bloody Sultan, his successor, Feroz Shah, bought 
receipts of pardon, duly initialled, from all who had 
lost a nose or a limb by order of the late king. 
They filled a great trunk which was placed at the 
head of his tomb. 

One sinister evening, in a hellish wind, I determine 
to do the six miles that separate the Kutb dak- 
bungalow from the ruins of Tughlakabad. The vast 
horizon is livid with dust, as though fleeing hordes 
were galloping all around, and the setting sun looks 



THE RUINS OF TUGHLAKABAD 191 

a dull copper behind the volutes of the simoom. 
Before me, the walls of the uninhabited city loom 
large and, on the top of the rock on which it stands, 
raise the battlements of their truncated conic towers 
a hundred feet above the plain. The mpression of 
massiveness is, at first, crushing. The town is four 
miles round. It resembles the first layer of an 
unfinished Babel. The rock bears on its surface 
blocks of stone weighing six tons, which themselves 
overlap ripped-open walls, the colour of grey night 
and ashes, the perspective of which diminishes and 
is rendered fantastic by a ray of yellow which picks 
out a piece of it. A fierce, distrustful outline, which 
contains the horror of summits struck by lightning, 
which conjures up the rebel savagery of a castle of 
Cain, the rudeness and passion of a house built by 
bad angels for the daughters of giants. You clamber 
by escarpments strewn with huge ashlars till you 
come to a ruined barbican. From there, you reach 
the topmost point of what was the citadel, the heart 
where beat the terrible will by which all these dwel- 
lings were begotten of this granite donjon. A hare 
flees among the rubbish, the tufts of wild beans, the 
shrubs on the walls, whose thin prickles protect 
their purple flowers. From the top, you see the 
half-hexagon of the ramparts, you look down into 
the cisterns, you follow the roads around. The 
remains of a mosque, of a palace stand out more 
clearl5^ Underground tunnels are hoflowed out. 
The eye wanders along gloomy passages, between 
empty houses. On every hand there is a sense of 



1 92 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

fear, of dreaded treason, the indelible soul of the 
slave-king walled-up alive in its strength and in its 
terror. 

Below, in the middle of a dried-up lake, which 
used to reflect the citadel — its dike now lies crumb- 
ling there, on the east — stands the sultan's tomb, 
built by the piety of the parricide son, who after- 
wards dared to lay himself by his father's side. - It 
stands in red sandstone and yellow marble on a 
pentagonal eyot. A bridge under whose arch the 
soil accumulates in running mud joins it to the 
mainland. The round, massive mausoleum, with 
sloping walls, copies, despite its surbased dome, the 
appearance of an Egyptian pylon and the soberness 
of its ornamentation produces as great an effect as 
the bareness of the walls of the citadel. It could 
withstand sieges. Thus the despot fortifies his death 
after his life and, in his unsure tomb, abdicates 
nothing, says no to dissolution, hardly feels time 
loosen the imperious lip or the hand clutching the 
sword-hilt, continues to challenge and to reign from 
the depths of his proud dust. What a professor of 
individualism was that monster ! 

This military sepulchre has justly been termed 
unrivalled. I can compare with it, at least as a site, 
none save the mausoleum of Birsing Deo, the hero 
of Bundelkund, at Orchha, in Central India. The 
great swell of the Betwa comes, over the remains 
of an overturned mole, to lick its base and the dry 
mud cracks in summer around the funeral stones : 
a grand music for a conqueror's sleep, the same that 



THE RUINS OF TUGHLAKABAD 193 

for fourteen centuries has lulled Alaric in the Sicilian 
bed of the Busento. 

Around the dry lake stand other, almost as 
imposing ruins, the chief of which is 'Adilabad, the 
fort of Sultan Muhammad. The rest is desert, 
aridity, an immense plain, more sinister in the 
troubled glimmer of the darkened sun which is 
about to disappear behind the Kutb than the land- 
scape of the Dead Sea itself in the hard light of 
Judaea. Those remains are sublime. And yet they 
recall but one hour of the prodigious annals, one 
page of the colossal epic that is the history of 
India : they are still too paltry to mark worthily in 
the fields of oblivion the place where lie so much 
human will, beauty and sorrow. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE VERSAILLES OF AKBAR THE GREAT— 
FATEHPUR-SIKRI 



With Akbar, we leave Delhi for Agra, or rather 
Fatehpur-Sikri, the capital which he made to 
spring up around the hermitage of the pious Salim 
Chisti and from which he governed his empire 
during fifteen years. Abandoned for strategic 
reasons or because of the lack of water, it still 
crowns its rock, without having suffered too much, 
comparatively speaking, from the ravages of time, 
and there exists, perhaps, no monumental whole 
that is more homogeneous and more expressive nor 
one that more liberally reveals a master personality. 
It is a more complete creation than Versailles in this 
sense, that subsequent reigns have added nothing to 
it. And Versailles displays one fault of taste — the 
only one — that of repeating indiscreetly the servile 
apotheosis of a personality which was certainly im- 
posing by the sense of its prerogative and its dignity, 
but which was intellectually limited and devoid of 
philosophy and human anxiety. How differently 



THE VERSAILLES OF AKBAR 195 

ample is the character of an Akbar ! What a 
lesson is his eclecticism for a contemporary like 
Philip n. or for the monarch of the Dragonnades a 
century later ! All this race of the Timurids shows 
a profound conception of destiny, of universal 
vanity, a conception touching to see in these elect or 
these scourges of God and one whose fatalism, 
whether ironical or grave, often, thanks to the 
majesty of the accent, equals the stoicism of a Marcus 
Aurelius. Timur, receiving Bajazet a prisoner in his 
tent, bursts into laughter. The emperor is surprised, 
asks a question : 

" It is because I am thinking," answers the Mogul, 
" that, in thirty years, we shall both be dead, the 
victor and the vanquished." 

Babar, in his candid and terrible Memoirs, between 
the story of a night of love and wine and the episode 
of a "minaret of skulls" built on some evening of 
battle, tells us that he wept at the scent of a Kabul 
melon which reminded him of his country. Akbar 
covers with phrases expressive of disillusionment 
the prodigious triumphal gate of Fatehpur-Sikri. 
Aurungzeb, on his death-bed — Aurungzeb the fanatic 
abhorred by the Hindus ! — writes : 

" I have no knowledge of myself, who I am, or for 
what purpose I am." 

And he thus ends his will : 

" The contracted thoughts of women bring nothing 
but discontentment. Farewell ! Farewell ! Fare- 
well ! " 

His father, Shah Jehan, before him, had built and 



196 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

dedicated to love that farewell of marble, of flowers, 
of melancholy and dreams which is the Taj of Agra. 

Akbar the Great towers over his line by all the 
height of his moral preoccupations and of the work 
achieved. His most marked feature is perhaps his reli- 
gious dilettantism. He presided over a veritable con- 
gress of religions at Fatehpur. A solution was gravely 
demanded of the eternal problems by the same rest- 
lessness of a tyrant-philosopher that resolves itself 
elsewhere into the epicurean and sceptic dilettantism 
of a Hadrian. But the oriental had known action, 
had steeped his meditation in it and did not consider 
that his labour could be repaid by anything less than 
a certainty. Did he find it ? We do not know. It 
would seem that, in the last resort, he sought it 
within himself; orthodox believers reproached him, 
at the end of his life, with not refusing to receive 
divine homage : a sufficiently logical conclusion ol 
overloaded pride. Or else, can we believe, judging 
by certain signs (a Hindu sanctuary near the palace 
of the Rajput ranee, a fresco of the Annunciation on 
the walls of the house presumed to be that of his 
Christian wife), that, like the king of Ecclesiastes and 
the Song of Songs, he embraced the creeds of the 
women whom he had loved best, a melting renuncia- 
tion of wisdom growing old in the presence of eternal 
voluptuousness ? . . . 

Has any one ever traced the psychology of the 
despot ? It would be difficult to imagine a more 
tragic or a more profoundly interesting study. The 
advance of the modern world has almost eliminated 



FATEHPUR-SIKRI 197 

the type of domineering humanity, with its sovereign 
caprices, with its almost infinite possibilities in the 
field of human faculties. Is it one day to reappear 
at the top of a scale of new values, rich in multiplied 
possibilities, as the master of the real keys of happi- 
ness and beauty ? . . . 

While waiting for it, let us try to disentangle 
the soul of one of its most illustrious predecessors, 
if not in the uncertain memory of his acts, at least 
through the august remains of his attempted ideal. 



The buildings of Fatehpur-Sikri cover the surface 
of a plateau which levels the top of a red sandstone 
ridge. The latter stands in the middle of an immense 
plain, at twenty-two miles from Agra, and raises its 
imperial acropolis, the lines of which, crowned by 
the mass of the great triumphal arch, invite and 
follow the traveller at a distance. An artificial lake 
bathed its foundations and the continuous grating of 
the water-wheels for the service of the baths and 
terraces used to frighten the birds in the reeds on the 
opposite shore. A too-wide enclosure hangs on the 
flank of the hill, like a baldrick no longer stretched 
by the weight of the sword. On the other side, it 
descends the gentle slopes and runs, until fastened 
in a knot by a ruined gate, around a great extent 
of plain, which is thus fixed to the mount which 
shelters it and in which nothing has remained intact. 
The palace and the pavilions on the hill are still, on 



198 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the other hand, erect, having been built, for the 
most part, on the Hindu technical principles, with- 
out vaults or framework, in placid layers and broad 
slabs of wrought stone. 

That is the most striking feature in this town 
conceived, developed and almost completed in the 
imagination and the will of one man : its character 
resolutely conforming with the traditions of the con- 
quered nation. The conquerors assert themselves 
in only one building, for that matter incomparable : 
the mosque. 

Akbar, a Persian on his mother's side, always 
showed a partiality for the culture and the language 
of that Greece of the East, But, in matters of archi- 
tecture proper, he deliberately drew upon Hindu 
sources, for political reasons, thus consecrating his 
rupture with his native land. The disposition of 
the tombs of the Timurid princes is significant on 
this point : the ancestor lies at Samarkand ; Babar 
wished his body to be carried back from Agra to 
Kabul ; Humayun is at Delhi ; Akbar at Sikan- 
darah ; Shah Jehan at Agra. 

An oriental palace consists of isolated buildings, 
generally of small dimensions, between which the air 
is able to circulate, the flowers to blossom. The 
necessities of the climate, the practice of polygamy 
require this. Sitting at the foot of the Khwabgah, 
or " House of Dreams," the private apartments of 
Akbar, whose little bed-chamber has Persian verses 
inscribed over the inner architraves of the doors and 
traces of frescoes on the walls, I have before me 



FATEHPUR-SIKRI 199 

the Khas Mahal, a veritable court of marble, around 
which are arranged the different edifices in which 
Akbar attended to the sovereign and private functions 
of his life. At my feet, a bason of green water shows, 
in its middle, a square island of stone, on which 
carpets were flung in summer : it is connected with 
the four sides by four narrow, sculptured bridges. 
Red steps lead down into the water. Further away, 
a marble throne, with no back to it, fashioned for 
the squatting attitude among the cushions, enabled 
the master to follow on a large chess-board, still 
visible in the pavement of the esplanade, the evolu- 
tions of the young slave-girls who took the place of 
the coloured ivory pieces. At the end is the Diwan- 
i-Khas, or Council-chamber, near the little structure 
reserved for the Hindu theologian ; on the right, 
the house, carved like a gem, of the Turkish sultana ; 
on the left, the Panch Mahal, with its superposed 
terraces and its many columns, where the queens 
used to come to wait for the night breezes. Outside 
the court, looking over the western wall, is the house 
of Miriam, the mysterious Portuguese wife, with its 
peeling frescoes, among which is a group that 
strangely suggests the classic subject of the Annun- 
ciation. Thus did repose, dominion, religion and 
love rhythmically fill that beautiful life. 

It is difficult to imagine a more picturesque con- 
ception than that of the Diwan-i-Khas. A central 
pillar, whose exquisite carvings recall, by a perhaps 
voluntary coincidence, the ornaments of the tomb of 
the emperor at the top of that mausoleum of Sikan- 



200 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

darah, itself, one would say, conceived in a recollec- 
tion of the terraces of the Panch Mahal, where the 
princesses used to come to sleep, spreads into an 
immense circular capital. From this capital, four 
balconies, with low open trellis stone balustrades, 
diverge to the corners of the pavilion, where second- 
ary platforms communicate with the ground by 
staircases. The emperor, like a god in the cup of a 
lotus-flower, sat in the centre of the corbelled 
capital ; a minister occupied each of the angles ; 
through the bays, either open or closed with screens 
of interlaced stone, the eye discovers the whole of 
the wide and almost perfectly circular horizon. The 
will of the master here radiated like a glowing hearth 
to the four corners of the sky, shot forth to the 
confines of the empire ; and I know no more poetic 
realization of a will of power and responsibility. ; 

The proximity of a stone canopy hewn in evident 
imitation of the Jain temples of the twelfth century^ — 
a canopy which, according to tradition, used to shelter 
the Hindu teacher with whomAkbar loved to converse 
— has given rise to the thought that the Diwan-i- 
Khas used to serve as a theatre for those religious 
discussions, the cause of such great scandal to the 
rigid ulemas, in which, in the twilight, the gods were 
heard passionately pleading through the voices of 
the wise men : Agni, the fire-god ; the Zoroastrian 
divinities ; Siva, who procreates and devours ; 
Buddha, god of infinite pity ; while no less a hearing 
was granted to a lean, dark monk, with the crucifix 
of the companions of Francis Xavier round his neck 



FATEHPUR-SIKRI 201 

and a Portuguese accent that brought a smile to the 
lips of his audience, who spoke in the name of Isa, 
Son of David, Who died to save mankind. Over 
these walls, red-gold in the sunset, where, since two 
centuries, the voices of the great have been silent, 
the air was heavy with sacred utterances. 

The Diwan-i-'Am, with its flat-roofed cloister, 
where the emperor dispensed his justice in public, 
closes the court on the east. The house of the 
Turkish Queen touches it almost : a gem of sculpture 
spreading on every side into a net-work of arabesques, 
with flowers set in them, over the whole surface of 
the outer pillars, the walls and the ceiling. The wall- 
space is hollowed out in shelved recesses, where the 
women used to lay the jewels, the gold and enamelled 
hookas, the dice of jade with ruby spots with which 
they whiled away the tedium of the day. Below 
these, a set of panels displays in relief a whole 
animal and forest life, where Hindu exuberance is 
modified with Chinese quaintness and mingles 
willows, palms, vines, heavy fruits with Tartar 
dragons and with the wild or winged beasts of the 
Himalayas. 

I receive the privilege of lodging in the house of 
Rajah Birbal, the first of the emperor's Hindu 
favourites. This little palace, standing on a raised 
platform, with its two storeys of carved sandstone, is 
a finished model of the style of Fatehpur-Sikri, the 
richness of the decoration relieving any heaviness or 
squatness in this construction, which contains not so 
much as a peg of wood nor any course other than the 



202 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

horizontal and which realizes an appearance ol 
grace and refinement by means of blocks of stone of 
almost Cyclopean dimensions. My room, on the 
ground-floor, is square and has four similar doors, 
between rectangular pillars, on which geometrical 
patterns are contained within borders of vegetal 
arabesques. The top of each door is formed by two 
supports in the form of a machicolation, projected 
by the two pillars and united, without touching each 
other, by an architrave laid flatwise. They carry the 
cusps so characteristic of Hindu architecture and, 
two and two, delineate a small arch which is repeated 
all round the room, framing both the full panels and 
the open bays. Above runs a frieze of alveoli 
joined to the long slabs that form the ceiling by a line 
of glandular ovolos. A delicate tracery on those 
slabs relieves their austerity. The oriental, when 
his dreams are not lost in the distances of the dome, 
loves to let them wander among the geometrical 
variegations of a fine ceiling : this is the luxury 
of recumbent people, the idleness of the heavenly 
kief. 

3 

The great mosque proudly towers over the south- 
western escarpment of Akbar's acropolis. 

A courtyard of about one hundred and twenty yards 
long by one hundred and fifty wide is flagged with 
white marble, whose smooth and dazzling surface, so 
religious and grave in its expression, is interrupted 
only by the ritual bason, a double-domed mausoleum 



FATEHPUR-SIKRI 203 

clad in airy marbles and the foliage of a few trees. 
The last often grow through the rough pavements of 
the mosques, where their grace, their tenderness of 
frail, leafy things seems necessary to relax the too 
naked meditation, the intense and painful ecstasy 
fixed upon the forehead of the Eternal. 

The porticoes that surround the immense rectangle 
are divided into cells. That at the back, which forms 
the sanctuary, is crowned by three domes, of which 
the two side ones rest on columns of a Hindu pattern. 
The middle one is joined to the quadrangular walls 
that support it by superb pendentives, forming an 
octagonal section, which, dividing itself into a sixteen- 
sided polygon, ends by wedding the circumference 
of the base of the dome. This even, geometrical pro- 
gression, the simplest of all, majestic, balanced, 
might appear ingenuous, were it not for the boldly 
pentagonal plan of the stalactites, the dissonance of 
a great master, soon resolved in the soft spherical 
harmony of the cupola. 

M. Gayet,* in a theory which is much too attractive 
not to be true, has depicted Arab art a prey to what 
he calls " its morose delectation," pursuing its ideal 
through the ordered maze of an ingenious polygon- 
ousness. The most impassioning notions of philo- 
sophy — the Becoming, eternity, the inevitable return 
(the prophecy of which burnt the lips of Zarathustra) 
— would weave its mystic woofs: a dream of essential 
beauty reduced to its pure numbers, stripped of 
perishable forms, free of change and pain. 

* UArt arabe, pp. 180-182. 



204 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Therefore the polygons radiate, unite, first on 
plane surfaces, then erected in space, sunk in the 
depths, enriched with a world of new combina- 
tions. They do not only trace an idle decoration : 
they express themselves in an infinitely varied 
language, a music of lines and forms, with ever 
new rhythms, the scale of whose numbers would be 
the infinite gamut. When we continue to ponder 
on this theme and on the generalizations of which it 
allows, when we admit the chimera of an aesthetic 
system of this sort that has become conscious, we 
stand surprised at its possibilities. We have archi- 
tecture, the most practical of the arts, ravished 
beyond the needs of utility, making sport of the 
fatalities of matter, gravitating, as the intoxicated 
harbinger of new initiations, towards the spheres of 
pure emotion where, alone, beauty henceforth sig- 
nifies truth or wisdom. In sculpture or painting, 
we have, first of all, enfranchisement. Art frees 
itself of its simian task, the legacy of humble 
ancestors ; it ceases to copy : an unprecedented 
revolution, preluded, perhaps without their own 
knowledge, by the Arabian architects, which would 
change the axis of the aesthetic world ; a flight 
towards the uncreated, not far from the exhausted 
forms, but through those very forms, penetrated, 
illumined from within by their resplendent laws : 
the formula-forms ; an apparent rupture with nature 
according to the Ruskinian canon, but, in truth, a 
differently intimate and exalting possession of nature 
in her most mysterious mystery and her most 



FATEHPUR-SIKRI 205 

jealous delights ! Science and art would work out 
their marvellous synthesis at a height which we 
should not even have dreamt of and it would remain 
for us to crown with pious hands the sacred works 
at whose feet humanity, as yet a child, after quiver- 
ing with youthful gladness, will venerate, in the 
fulness of its age, a promise even fairer than the 
lesson which it will have learnt from them. 

This doubtless necessary crisis, which Islam, 
without its vicissitudes and less buttressed by its 
faith, would perhaps have effected, was so little 
foreseen by Akbar's architects that they covered the 
polyhedrical alveoli, overwhelmed the sharp herring- 
bone ridges, bound together the mystic traceries and 
their potentiality of indefinite expansion with all the 
leaves and all the flowers, from the lotus of the 
Ganges to the roses of Iran. Persian art, its smiling 
and facile graces were to seduce and delay Moslem 
art on the threshold of an extraordinary destiny. 
The anthropomorphous and imitative Aryan — of 
whom ancient Greece was the most perfect type — 
took the upper hand, bound captive the transcen- 
dental dreamery of the Semite : an admirable defeat, 
which we cannot bring ourselves to regret when we 
contemplate its vestiges. 

If Persian polychromy does not yet then invade 
the exterior of the monument with a casing of many- 
coloured tiles (it will do so less than a century later 
and give us the delightful mosque of Vazir Khan at 
Lahore), it breaks out into mural paintings in the 
interior, covers the austere walls with gaudy 



2o6 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

tapestry, softens with a languid sensuousness the 
severe love of the unimaginable God. The time of 
the great designs is past; the eye of faith is no 
longer fixed upon the promised horizons, but falls 
upon the flowers by the roadside. Man bends under 
his too-heavy will. His belief also, without admit- 
ting so much to itself, hesitates sometimes, dares to 
look at the hour beside eternity, at the creature over 
the uncreated : see the faithless heart of humanity, 
the old base wisdom, of which Omar Khayyam takes 
up the song after Horace, but in a more poignant 
manner than the amiable pensioner of Tivoli, invi- 
ting man to his brief joys from a much greater dis- 
tance, from the very depths of pain and destiny. 

The walls of the mosque are pierced by three 
gateways. One of these, the southernmost, did 
not form part of the original plan : it is really a 
triumphal arch, intended to celebrate the emperor's 
victories in Guzerat. This mass, one hundred and 
fifty feet high, the central arch opening upon a half- 
dome, the four minarets at the four corners of the 
trapezium that forms the plan, the broad steps that 
lead up to the entrance, the decHvity in the ground 
continuing the slope of the steps make of this gate a 
monument unequalled in its kind. Seen from below, 
on the edge of the village whose humbled hovels are 
heaped up at the foot of the hill, the effect is sub- 
lime. It lies in the very disproportion between that 
titanic mass and its surroundings, in the proud 
upward leap of that stone canopy, whose minarets 
look like the poles that formerly, in the native 



FATEHPUR-SIKRI 207 

steppes, carried skins of beasts or motley carpets 
over the conqueror in state. I know only one other 
monument in which the verticals reach the same 
pitch of magnificence and that is Beauvais Cathedral. 
It is the same Hosannah in excelsis ! For the rest, 
the Moslem epigraph, with so just a lyricism, ex- 
claims : 

"Its mihrab is like the broad-browed morning, 
its pinnacles like the Milky Way, its gate cries 
aloud! . . ." 

A marvellous revelation, an inspired translation 
of the feeling that takes hold of you before that 
formidable arch, whence seems to issue as it were a 
shout of victory, continuous, louder than the trumpets 
of a hundred Fames, from the top of the pedestal 
that lifts it proudly on the horizon of Hindustan. 
And the great cry of pride rings out over the rich 
plains, the peaceful towns, the unsubdued jungle, to 
die away absorbed in the astonished murmur of the 
southern shores. 

Then one thinks of other words, those whose 
threefold riband forms the rich rectangle in which, 
according to the almost invariable rite, the arch is 
cut out with an august simplicity. They say : 

" The world is a bridge : pass over it, but build 
no house upon it. The world endures but an hour : 
spend it in prayer ; who sees the rest ? Thy 
greatest richness is the alms which thou hast given. 
Know that the world is a mirror where fortune has 
appeared, then fled : call nothing thine that thy eyes 
cannot see." 



2o8 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

And mingled with the admiration of those pure 
Hnes, of that material grandeur, of that realized 
miracle of art is an element of thought, veneration 
and melancholy that makes up one of those rare 
sensations of completeness which time cannot im- 
pair in our memory and which we would buy at the 
cost of any exile. 

From the top, amid the efflorescence of the domed 
turrets and the spear-heads of the minarets, through 
the skein of the swallows in the lowering sky, I see 
the village at my feet and, quite close, the old, 
crumbling baths. A transparent sheet of tin seems 
to close the horizon where the fort of Agra stands 
out on clear days. On the other side are the court 
of the mosque, the domes of the gates where whirls 
a flight of silky wings and, set in the middle, with 
its pavement flung down before it like a carpet, the 
tomb of the holy calender. And it is a tent, the 
rude tent of the pastoral migrations, between the 
days of Abraham and those of Mahomet, that re- 
appears through the unreal lattice-work, the fretted 
marble screens of this tomb, set up by Azrael for 
the sleep of the just in the very shadow of the 
Justiciary. 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE OLD GARDENS OF KASHMIR 



The obscure laws that rule the destinies of races 
seem to have transmitted from Timur to Akbar the 
same strong love of dominion, which became less 
vigorous as it grew more lucid, a brutal appetite for 
conquest that expanded into an organizing wisdom, 
which, nevertheless, was but a stage towards death. 
For the will to live, so powerfully resilient in each 
generation of the Timurid dynasty, seems to weaken 
from Akbar the Great onwards. Jehangir and Shah 
Jehan were not so much headstrong tyrants as con- 
templatives and voluptuaries. The treasure got 
together by the eiforts of the ancestors demanded to 
be enjoyed, the heaped-up possibilities of delight 
— the tribute of two centuries of raiding and carnage 
— asked to be allowed to flourish. In Aurungzeb 
reappeared the atavistic fighting instinct, coloured 
with fanaticism. But this time it was against fate; 
the heroic ages were accomplished: after the son 
of Shah Jehan, the mighty line slipped away in 
phantoms. 



2IO THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

The reign of Jehangir resembles a pastoral inter- 
lude. Abandoning the capitals, he fell in love with 
the valley of Kashmir. Persian poetry has exhausted 
its images in extolling that most delicious of all the 
world's regions, even as the Arabs lavished upon 
Damascus all the wealth of oriental lyrics. Whether 
you descend from Tibet and the central table-land of 
Asia, both so sterile and inhospitable, or come, 
through the unsafe passes of the Himalayas, from 
the burning plains of India, this basin of verdure 
is an enchantment, with its flowery lakes, its 
running wells, surrounded by snowy crests some of 
which rise five-and-twenty thousand feet into the 
sky. 

From lake to lake, along the slow rivers, between 
giant trees whose branches graze the roofs of the 
floating houses, little islands of sand covered with 
flowering crops, at the point of which a heron stands 
on one leg and dreams, while around you the ring 
of glittering mountains that encloses the rich valley 
turns like a wheel ; or else under the tents pitched 
at the will of caprice or time, on the brink of a 
torrent, on the skirt of a forest pf cedars, at the 
bottom of a furrow hollowed out by an avalanche, 
filled with flowers and rustling with wings, whence, 
for hours, you will follow with your eyes the smoke 
of the nomads amid the birch-trees or the majestic 
circling of an eagle a thousand yards above your head 
against the glorious background of a silver glacier, it 
is sweet to live in this land, from spring that favours 
the iris to autumn fortunate in the lotus. For these 



THE OLD GARDENS OF KASHMIR 211 

two blowings mark the seasons for the inhabitants of 
Kashmir. One opens beautiful jagged cups, white, 
sulphur or violet, over all the country-side and, by 
preference, around the low stones of the Moslem 
cemeteries. The other strews the clear waters of 
the three lakes and their floating gardens with great 
pink flowers, whose golden pistils, shaped like capitals, 
seem pedestals worthy of the pensive or ecstatic gods 
whom the legends seat there. Here men lead a life 
of languor and idleness, which nothing trammels, 
which everything retains, amid the sensuousness of 
moving water, of numberless perfumes, of an atmo- 
sphere so pure that the lines of things seem to be 
transfigured in it as in a magic ether that should 
dispense a beauty of its own and an unknown 
enchantment. 

Now the Emperor Jehangir and the fair Nurmahal, 
his empress, were smitten with a fondness for the 
Happy Valley that lasted longer than life, so much 
so that the dying monarch asked to be moved to the 
brink of the great source at Vernag. Here, the 
Jhelum, which the companions of Alexander called 
Hydaspes, rises from the depths of the earth with a 
fine, plentiful rhythm, a magnificent stream mightily 
and amply swollen by the mysterious eiFort which 
men worshipped in their early terror and gratitude. 

Following the roads familiar to the Great Moguls, 
one reaches the high valley of the Jhelum, from India, 
in fifteen days' march, with tents. The Moguls took 
three months over the journey. A city of canvas, a 
hundred thousand horsemen, fifty thousand men on 



212 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

foot, as many functionaries, slaves and eunuchs, the 
whole retinue^of the queens, princesses and favourites 
escorted them. The elephants sniffed the snow of 
the passes. At night, in front of the master's purple 
pavilion, a giant beacon signalled the sovereign will 
that moved this tumultuous mass, the soul of the 
horde. They travelled by short stages. There 
were two camps, so that one was always pitched on 
the arrival of the train. On the road, they hunted 
the wild-boar, the tiger, the lion even, which was 
then found in Hindustan, by means of nets, of armies 
of beaters or of a donkey drunk with opium that 
served as a bait. 

Thus, at least, does Bernier show us the move- 
ments of Shah Jehan. Those of Jehangir seem to 
have had a simpler and more bucolic character. 
After the torrid plains of Agra and Delhi came an 
animal desire for green grass to sleep upon, rippling 
waters to listen to, blue horizons over snowy 
mounts to gaze upon, idly stretched on the cool 
sward, through the branches of flowering apple-trees. 
A serai of ornamented wood was erected on the 
brink of the lakes or fountains, sometimes on the 
current itself, visible through the miradors of the 
walls and the cracks of the boards, without pomp or 
state, under a grassy roof, calculated to lull hours of 
idyllic leisure with the sound, most delicious of all to 
eastern ears, of murmuring water. Such are Vernag 
and Atchibal to this day. 

The gardens of Nishat Bagh and Shalimar belong 
to a later, a more voluptuous, a less exclusively 



THE OLD GARDENS OF KASHMIR 213 

rural period. They taper their terraces under the 
mighty shades of the Mogul plane-trees along the 
shores of the Dal, the lake of Srinagar, a tepid, 
limpid sheet, with a grassy bottom, great rafts of 
rushes laden with vegetation — the famous floating 
gardens — intersected by low banks of grass and wil- 
lows, with fantastic old bridges, flocks of water-fowl, 
pink lotuses on which kingfishers stand perched : 
the whole hemmed in by glorious mountains. 

On the lower slopes of these mountains, the 
pleasure-gardens of the Padishahs, climbing in 
superposed platforms the gently-ascending hill 
which sends down upon them in successive falls the 
mass of its waters, reveal a whole aspect of the 
pensive, sensuous, pastoral soul of Islam. At the 
other end of its empire, under the western horn of 
the Crescent, another garden, that of the Alhambra, 
preserves the fame of one of the most seductive 
spots on earth. Both are halting-places of the 
Believer, palaces or tombs, retreats of voluptuous- 
ness or death, flowering limits placed by ironical 
fate to mark the will of man and the glory of God. 

The Persian garden, with its love of orderly 
symmetry, its rectangular canals, its shrubs bordered 
with hewn stone, would incline one to believe that 
the majestic formalism of a Le Notre was an Aryan 
reminiscence. And our excuse for talking at such 
length of these ruined parks is that we surprise 
here, perhaps, the most intimate, the most secret 
part of the Moslem soul : the fulness of the absolute 
demanded of the extreme emotions of the flesh ; 



214 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

grave heroic languors in which strength lies dormant; 
latent energies inundated with passion and fatality ; 
a sense, at once profound and simple, of short, vain 
life, powerfully and ardently hugged, in spite of all 
things, in the transport of an intoxicated anguish . . . 



I shall always remember a supper given us by the 
brother of the Maharajah of Kashmir in the gardens 
of ShaHmar. As on the gate of another Shalimar, 
at Lahore, the most typical, perhaps, of these im- 
perial gardens, that one which reflects such marvel- 
lous ceramic ware in its melancholy canals, one 
might carve over the entrance that old Persian in- 
scription : 

Sweet is this garden, through envy of which the tulip is 

spotted ; 
The rose of the sun and moon forms its beautiful lamp. 

The table was laid under a kiosk with black marble 
columns, in the middle of a square bason. From 
three sides of the square fell three cascades, whose 
sheet of mobile crystal was illumined by lamps set 
behind them in recesses. The fourth side opened 
out the perspective of a long canal bordered with 
lights, with a line of playing waters as an axis, the 
last of which ran out towards the lake in moonlit 
distances. Four other rows of spouting fountains 
in the bason itself raised as it were a forest of 
silver lances around the kiosk with its glittering 



THE OLD GARDENS OF KASHMIR 215 

marbles. We were surrounded by the splashing, 
by the efficient coolness of the heavenly water, the 
glory of the consoling water, the feast and the 
apotheosis of water. Shiraz wine in inlaid jugs, 
Kabul melons, a book of songs and " the soft moon- 
face" of the saki^ or cup-bearer (a slim cypress 
among the jasmine nudities of the sultanas): no 
more was needed, amid such a setting, by these 
great and candid artists in sensuousness. 

Remote and closed as this soul of Islam remains, 
I doubt if we ever felt it nearer to us than that 
evening, among the fountains and the night-blossoms 
of the garden of Shalimar, while the full moon of 
August, from above the snows of the Tibetan 
frontier, poured down its clear light into the most 
beautiful valleys of the world. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE PALACES AT AGRA AND DELHI— 
THE TAJ MAHAL 



Both the walled space of the fort ol Agra and that 
of the palace of Delhi present a magnificent military 
setting. The high walls, faced with the pink sand- 
stone that supplies the materials for Fatehpur-Sikri, 
lift their wide mitriform battlements at seventy feet 
above the ground. Moats thirty feet wide by five- 
and-thirty feet deep are obstructed with posterns, 
barbicans, defences which raise line upon line of 
battlements and embrasures, one above the other, 
before the counterscarps. Gates open behind their 
portcullises and drawbridges between octagonal 
towers, with skirts set off with white stone, each 
crowned with a dome and joined to the others by 
galleries of turrets. At Delhi, the Lahore Gate com- 
mands a huge arcade, a vaulted passage, lined with 
recesses and shops, forming a bazaar, at the end of 
which blossomed the esplanades, the gardens and the 
imperial marbles, in a distance that intensified 
imagination and desire. 



THE PALACES AT AGRA AND DELHI 217 

From the defensive point of view, these glorious 
citadels, inspired, no doubt, by the architecture of 
our own middle ages — there was no lack of European 
adventurers to cast guns or build towers to the order 
of the Great Moguls — hardly count and did not 
oppose to the Enghsh guns, in 1857, ^^^ same re- 
sistance as that, for instance, of the mud ramparts 
of a Bhurtpur, into which Lord Lake's cannon-balls 
sank, scarce troubling the crocodiles in the moat. But 
I doubt whether any other fortress presents so great 
an appearance of knightly splendour, of proud and 
noble dignity, easily attaining the majestic without 
passing through the ferocious, or with a more 
sovereign grace crowns its red bastions with their 
lightly-poised crests of miniature columns and white 
domes. 

Of the two palaces proper of Agra and Delhi, the 
former, as Fergusson very correctly says, is in 
somewhat better taste, but the second, if conceived 
as a whole, would have presented as complete a 
document on Shah Jehan as Fatehpur-Sikri on 
Akbar. Only scattered fragments are left, especially 
of the second. Am I to broach the chapter of the 
English devastations ? One hesitates : the sincerest 
dispositions towards impartiahty turn to bitterness ; 
the inexpiable cries from the ruins and the soil. 
Of a mass of monuments that covered twice as 
great an area as the Escorial (the palace occu- 
pied within the fortress a parallelogram of 1000 
yards long by 500 yards wide) nothing but 
ruins remains. The most eloquent indictment 



2i8 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of the vandalism of the destroyers has been 
pronounced by a British subject, Fergusson, the 
author of works on the defence of fortified places 
and an expert, who says that this unnecessary act 
of vandalism was performed deliberately, without 
strategic excuse and without the making a single 
plan of what was being destroyed. Strive as we 
may to remember that we have to do with the work 
of soldiers drunk and maddened with their suffer- 
ings in the Mutiny and with a doubtful triumph, 
that these things were perpetrated in the darkest 
days of that " Victorian era " in which ugliness and 
bad taste reigned on every throne ; recollect as we 
will that all conquerors are alike and that, when all 
is said, the idealism of the dreamer has not yet 
found an idiom in which to call action sister: 
in spite of everything, I am of opinion that here a 
supreme crime has crowned the series of the attacks 
on beauty. Have the culprits gone so far as, I will 
not say to repent, but, simply, to conceive a notion 
of the heinousness of their crime ? I doubt it. ' Did 
they not display a shade of iconoclastic coquetry in 
sending as viceroy to India a descendant of that 
Lord Elgin for whom ancient Greece would have 
widened the pillory of Herostratus ? 



Each of the two palaces contains a Diwan-i-'Am 
for public audiences and official state receptions ; a 
Diwan-i-Khas for private receptions, at which 



THE PALACES AT AGRA AND DELHI 219 

pleasure and magnificence ceased to hold count with 
the necessity for display and where luxury gave enter- 
tainments for its own benefit ; the private apartments 
of the emperor ; and, lastly, behind all the rest, 
against the rampart which it crowns with carved 
stone, the zenana of the princesses, caressed by the 
coolest breezes and reflected twenty yards below in 
the waters of the Jumna. And we must not forget 
the mosques, the oratories, the hammams, which 
play an important part, the esplanades for the re- 
views, the stone tilt-yards where the elephants used 
to fight, the terraces, the many gardens, the great 
wells with inner spiral galleries, which are found no- 
where except in India and which afforded a shelter 
to the prince and the favourites in the great heats. 

Almost all the white-marble surfaces are covered 
with those incrustations of precious materials the art 
of which, borrowed from Florence, was, we are told, 
brought to the Court of Shah Jehan by European 
artists. Lapis lazuli, jasper, bloodstone, chalcedony, 
cornelian, agate, onyx, different marbles, jade, tur- 
quoise, beryl, strewed the white marbles of the 
monuments of Shah Jehan with their fairy-like de- 
signs of flowers and twines. If this style of decora- 
tion lacks " the intellectual beauty of Greek orna- 
ment," at least we must allow that it possesses an 
incomparable richness and brilliancy, a different sort 
of lavishness, a more smiling sensuousness, without 
counting the fact that many tympanums of arches 
show vegetal or conventional scrolls of an exquisite 
grace of line in addition to a magical and varied 



2 20 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

colouring the purity of which delights the immacu- 
late surface of the marble that bathes them. 

A love of jewels characterized the Mogul em- 
perors at all times. Akbar caused to be placed at 
the head of his tombstone, on the last terrace of the 
Sikandarah mausoleum, on a small pillar of sawn 
marble, an extraordinary diamond, the Koh-i-Nur 
(which Nadir Shah was to carry off to Teheran less 
than two centuries later), as an offering to the sun. 
On the accession of the monarchs, cups full of pre- 
cious stones were passed round their heads and 
afterwards distributed to the courtiers. In Shah 
Jehan, this taste developed into a passion, from 
which resulted that legendary Peacock Throne which 
was valued by a contemporary French jeweller at 
one hundred and fifty million francs and which must 
have offered anything but a commonplace symbol 
of royalty between its platform and its canopy of 
massive gold, on a dazzling background of plumage 
formed of rubies, sapphires and emeralds, under its 
umbrellas of crimson velvet embroidered and fringed 
with pearls. In the midst of these splendours, the 
master, himself clad in white garments covered with 
priceless gems, appeared as we see him in the old 
Persian miniatures, his forehead girt with a scarcely 
imaginary halo, holding a flower to his nostrils. 



3 

The weekly solemnity of the 'Am Khas displayed 
before the columned portico of the Diwan-i-'Ara 



THE PALACES AT AGRA AND DELHI 221 

processions of soldiers, dancers and beasts of battle. 
But the ceremonies of the Diwan-i-Khas probably 
carried the palm as the refinement of a more intimate 
luxury, which the building, a pavilion of white 
marble, open on its four sides, reveals in its more 
exquisite richness within its more imposing dimen- 
sions. The columns and arches are no longer of 
red sandstone, but of pure marble. 

At Delhi, the Diwan-i-Khas raises its aerial mass, 
with its wide slanting eaves of marble, topped by 
four turrets, between an inner court and the ram- 
part which it crowns and from which its bays closed 
with carved stone overlook the Jumna, its too-wide 
bed and the wealth of the riverside gardens, to-day 
dusty and wasted. Lean against that balustrade and, 
turning your back to the horizon, let your eyes 
wander through the square pillars relieved by the 
four little columns that flank them and the marvel 
of the decafoil arches (the smaller have six foils) 
with axe-edged arrises, which, by a happy thought, 
are divided into three sections deepwise, of which 
the middlemost is the deepest. The multiplica- 
tion of these arrises and of these acute angles on 
different plans cuts up with a bold, unexpected, 
superlatively light and sumptuous grace the pieces 
of perspective that appear between the columns : 
crude sky, pale foliage or glittering ceihng. This 
ceiling, once of massive silver, the sheets of which 
went to swell Nadir Shah's booty, was valued by 
Tavernier at twenty-six millions of our money. It 
was replaced by another in wood. The decoration 



222 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

unites marble, gold and fine stones. The reliefs are 
gilt ; gilt are the narrow capitals of the pillars. The 
familiar outline of the arcature shaped like the neck 
of a Greek vase, enriched by an original floral fan- 
tasy, frames with gold the dahlias, the tulips, the 
foxgloves and the columbines which, with an almost 
heraldic pomp, unfold their sardonyx calyces and 
their malachite leaves. Nothing equals the charm 
of the old gold against the marble._ It evokes the 
mystic embraces of the rays and meteors, the magic 
of the sunset on the snow, the most heavenly feasts 
of light and ether. 

Then, in spite of the hideous whitewash, the 
crudity of the modern gilding, the paltry sheds that 
peep out between the intervals of the pillars or the 
trees, one regains the illusion of one of those places 
where the dream of crowned ambition, the will of the 
despot, the enjoyment of life amid the most intoxi- 
cating good fortune of permitted realization are 
exalted in the most passionate degree. And it 
needs no effort to attain the state of soul manifested 
by the famous Persian inscription on this unequalled 
monument : 

If on earth be an Eden of bliss, 
It is this, it is this, none but this ! 

4 
To the right of the Diwan-i-Khas is the harem ; to 
the left the baths. From the one to the other, 
through the private apartments of the emperor and 



THE PALACES AT AGRA AND DELHI 223 

the begums, a channel of running water carries in a 
straight line, parallel with the rampart, its pledge 
of rippling coolness, without which no eastern 
luxury would deem itself complete. Shallow, easy 
to cross barefooted, it flows uncovered, except be- 
neath the Diwan-i-Khas, where it is hidden by flags 
through which it raised its murmur, as of a distant 
source, to the sovereign's throne. The bright, moving 
water makes a delicious complement to the trans- 
parency and the polish of the marble. Like snow, 
the marble is kneaded of innumerous crystals ; like 
the marble that slips, the water flees, vies with it 
in diaphaneity and purity, doubles the image and 
the beguilement of its cup with a reflection that is a 
caress. The water mirrors carved ceilings, lustrous 
walls, alabaster gratings with touches of gold, 
meanders through the gardens under live flowers, 
spreads into sheets of silver before niches adorned 
with lamps and imagines a new enchantment on 
leaving the cool, jealous darkness : the enchant- 
ment of light. Here, around the bath of the begums, 
it knots a channel in which the waving incrustations 
copy the poise of the grasses, the flight of the fishes ; 
there, in the middle of the same apartment, it bubbles 
in a bason which it seems to have carved for itself, so 
greatly does the marble here seem wrinkled like sand 
in the shells of a beach at ebb-tide, in a net-work 
of pale jasper, unless indeed the marble hollows 
itself out, like the abandoned mould of some fossil 
lotus. Further, the mobile element was given reser- 
voirs of jade, whose kerbs were decorated with 



2 24 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

auspicious stones : rubies, diamonds, carbuncles and 
those old-fashioned turquoises of which the mine is 
lost. Water, jade, living flesh : a triple fairydom oi 
voluptuousness ! 

Then, like Narcissuses exalted by the contempla- 
tion of their own beauty, the marbles yearn and speak. 
You may read this on the wall of the Khwabgah, 
which forms a counterpart to the Hammam, on the 
other side of the Diwan-i-Khas : 

" Let us celebrate this garden of Haiyut Baksh, 
which is in the palace like a lamp in an assembly, 
and this clear canal, whose limpid water is as a 
mirror for every creature that sees and, for the sage, 
unveils the mystic world, and these cascades, each 
of which, one might say, is the whiteness of the 
morning or else a tablet stolen from the secrets of 
fate." 

Thus water, already a witch, becomes an initia- 
trix ; it lends its soul to those magnificences which, 
without it, one might consider barbarous ; it sheds 
over this scene of too-facile sensuousness a little 
of that haughty anxiety, of that voluptuous sadness 
in which the primitive lust after power or pleasure 
is dignified by an infinite aspiration. 



5 

The Moti Musjid, or Pearl Mosque, still within 

the precincts of Agra Fort, remains not only perhaps 

the most perfect architectural work that the Moguls 

have left us, but a dazzling proof of their ability, 



THE PALACES AT AGRA AND DELHI 225 

essential in all finished art, to show beauty by the 
mere eloquence of pure line and matter. The dignity, 
the sovereign chastity of these bare marbles spoilt 
by no misplaced ornamentation make of this ethereal 
temple a court of prayer elect above all those on 
earth. 

There is something more intense in the mystic 
impression of those denticulated arches, those white 
and bluey perspectives than in the flight of the 
Gothic perpendiculars. The sense of the divine 
given by the gigantic Tamil pagodas, the largest 
in the world, seems confused, extravagant, muddy 
beside the fervour that shines forth from this act of 
faith and grace hewn in the most perfect substance 
wrought by the central fires. The serenity of the 
Greek temple has not that passion petrified in 
beauty. The one welcomes the divinity born of 
the play of the elements, the child of the clouds, the 
waves and the winds, blossoming from the original 
myth with no more pains than the flower from the 
bud ; the other, to which the divinity is the incon- 
ceivable, calls to it, evokes it in a poem of fervent 
stone. It is the same difference as between joy and 
rapture. Yet let it not be imagined that there is 
anything strained or sorrowful in the sensation given 
by the Pearl Mosque. The first emotion is rather one 
of peace and serenity. It is only later that one begins 
to feel the ardour which the purified meditation 
of the believer would there be capable of attaining. 
Then, a vibration as of metal at white heat sends its 
waves coursing over those marbles. Next, all is peace 

p 



226 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

once more : the sanctuary is alive, a mysterious soul 
throbs there between bliss and ecstasy. ... 



The mausoleum raised by Shah Jehan to the 
Empress Mumtaz-i-Mahal (the Pride of the Palace) 
is certainly the best known and most glorified 
building in India. That tomb of white marble, 
which carries to the same height as our Pantheon 
its aerial dome above the waters that mirror it and 
rises, like an apparition, from the dark foliage of a 
garden-court, unites the most stirring associations 
of glory, beauty, love and death. Artists, irritated 
at hearing it compared with the Parthenon, have 
accused it of finikin affectation, of official coldness. 
Poets, on the other hand, have raved with admira- 
tion. It seems to defy the judgment of men and to 
disconcert comparison, criticism and praise alike. One 
day, the Taj will have ceased to supply globe-trotters 
with opportunities for fine writing ; but will it ever 
be classed, ranked in the calm, somewhat dull 
Olympus of the master-pieces ? I cannot say. The 
reader will find plentiful descriptions of it elsewhere. 
But something in its beauty, the chaste and fond 
spirit of its genius remains inimitable. Phrases, 
colours, outlines: everything betrays it. Between 
dryasdusticism and lyricism, emotion escapes. Let 
us then leave the man of action to beg these beautiful 
marbles to cool his brow, his fever; the aesthete to 
dream here of the marvellous adolescence of some 



THE PALACES AT AGRA AND DELHI 227 

Messiah of beauty, the Ion of these barbaric pre- 
cincts ; the artist, amid the inner penumbra of the 
double pierced screens of marble tempering the 
light down to the tombs, to spell out the poetry 
of the epitaphs, while the heights of the dome fill 
with music, the eternal inquietude of never-resting 
echoes. 

And let us simply, with the worthy author of 
Murray's Handbook, recommend frequent visits to 
the Taj and its gardens, especially at dawn, by 
moonlight and at the wane of day. It is perhaps 
at this last time that the Taj finds its fullest expres- 
sion. From the top of the right-hand mosque (the 
garden-enclosure is flanked by two mosques), the 
view embraces a noble landscape. Between the 
garden and the river, the mass of immaculate 
marble assumes tones of honey and amber, the out- 
lines of the dome and of the cypresses luxuriate 
in the twilit sky, as though in the conscious delight 
of their mystery and their harmony. Towering 
over the purple mass of the fort on the horizon 
are the three domes of the Moti Musjid and two 
palm-trees leaning towards each other. The river 
is rose and blue. 

In Shah Jehan's design, a monumental bridge was 
intended to span it at this spot, uniting the Taj 
with another mausoleum of like splendour, where 
the emperor would have lain himself. But, instead 
of this fair dream, we see only a flat shore, where 
big tortoises are half stranded, pebbles over which a 
plover trips its way. And nothing joins the two 



228 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

banks of the river, except at times a flight of green 
parrakeets, skimming over the surface of the water, 
emerald arrows stolen from the golden quiver of the 
twilight, a message from desire to death over the 
water softly flowing. 



CHAPTER X 
ENGLISH INDIA— HILL STATIONS— SIMLA 



The Indian summer has nothing of the blest season 
of fruits and harvests, casinos and watering-places 
which we call by that name. Since the time of the 
Vedas, men here have been wished " a hundred 
winters" as we might speak of summers or springs. 
The fact is that, in India, the summer is hell, gehenna. 
We are unable to picture to ourselves those unparal- 
leled torments. The Europeans who are condemned 
to remain in the plains appear at the end of autumn 
haggard, emaciated, almost unrecognizable. Some- 
times, even often, they do not reappear at all. 

During two hours out of the twenty-four, the two 
hours immediately preceding sunrise, you have a 
sensation of living and this respite is given you so 
that you may realize your position and its charms. 
The rest of the day is made up of torpor, extreme 
depression, semi-insomnia continuing that of the 
night; at five o'clock in the morning, a ride on 
horseback ; at seven o'clock, the house is barricaded 
against the all-devouring enemy, the sun : doors and 



2 30 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

windows are closed, are hung with tatties which are 
periodically wetted. The thermantidote begins to 
send out its current of cool air, the punkahs to swing 
in their silent and illusive see-saw. Outside, the 
scorching wind gets up and blows its furnace 
breath. A certain number of officials have to 
continue their ordinary duties : these are the most 
to be pitied. For the others annihilation begins. 
Stretched at full length, with the valance of the 
punkah at an inch from their face, they lie motion- 
less. Gradually, visions pass before their eyes : a 
lane in Devonshire, with a strip of blue sea at 
the end of it ; a Scotch glen in early morning : heather 
in which the dew-drops weave little cobwebs between 
the purple flowers, cool mists rising from the lake 
in the valley ; the garden of an old priory in Kent : 
ivy creeping over the stone cross-bars of the front, 
borders full of old-fashioned flowers, the sun-dial 
near the box hedge ; a nook in the New Forest : 
oaks, underwood, a scudding roe-deer, springs rip- 
pling in the moss. . . . Suddenly comes a cry out- 
side, three notes repeated each time louder than the 
last, insistent, distinct, maddening: it is the brain- 
fever-bird, so-called because in its cry you hear, 
" Brain-fever ! Brain-fever I Brain-fever I " . . . With 
every nerve on end, the man listens ; he feels a 
sudden longing to dash his head against the wall : 
were he not so hot, he would do so at once; his 
pillow is already moist with sweat and his skin 
irritated with incessant perspiration ; he feels the 
prickly heat tattooing his face with the story of his 



ENGLISH INDIA 231 

life's irony and his useless effort, the " no luck " of 
the convict who will never escape again. 

At six o'clock in the evening, you drag yourself 
to the club. In towns of some importance, the 
military band plays : comic-opera tunes, tol-de-rol 
ditties, woolly waltzes ; the men drink endless 
whisky-pegs, so-called because each glass that you 
take is supposed to add a peg to your coffin. They 
are not in a good humour. The women, in the 
room reserved for them, turn over the pages of the 
fashion-papers published in London a month ago, 
while systematically shattering the reputations of 
their luckier sisters who have gone to the hills. 

In the lost little stations in the Centre and South, 
it often happens that only one or two women remain, 
whose husbands have not the means to send them 
to the mountains. They stay behind with no other 
consolation than to watch themselves grow daily 
older and uglier — very few beauties are able to 
resist the hot weather — while their husbands are 
incensed at the promotion that fails to come and 
the children become etiolated, with their faded pink 
cheeks, their dulled fair hair, their silent lips on 
which the ayah secretly lays a mysterious pill that 
gives sweet dreams and a deep sleep, a grain of 
opium provided by the syce whom she loves and 
whom she will join presently, with no fear of an 
unexpected awakening. 

One cannot but feel admiration for these beings 
who pay for their country's greatness by the sacrifice 
of themselves. Such is the ransom of power, the 



232 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

reverse of a glorious empire. And they cling to 
this greatness — for they have business notions — in 
proportion to the price which they have paid for it. 
The sceptics may say that so great an endurance 
presupposes too much energy not to be exercised to 
the detriment of sensibility and that the feelings 
of these people must belong to a primitive order. 
Effort, they say, makes the hand and the heart alike 
callous. But we shall never correct the sceptics; 
and here as elsewhere one comes across wonderful 
instances of devotion; 



Let us rather follow the flight of the delighted 
mem-sahibs towards the hills, even as the earth- 
worm follows the butterfly's course through space. 
They are dreaming of balls, of gymkhanas, of exces- 
sive and victorious flirtations. They come from 
every part of the peninsula, from far-away resi- 
dencies, from crusty garrison-towns, from stifling 
cities. They have an overplus of activity to get rid 
of, arrears of innocent (oh, so innocent !) trifling to 
make up, a love of life to satisfy. Here they come : 
young girls under the vigilant protection of their 
mothers or chaperons ; old girls who protect them- 
selves without assistance, but without conviction; 
irreproachable wives guarded by assorted husbands ; 
and, above all, the sacred battalion of grass-widows ! 

The grass-widow is one of the institutions of 
modern India. She is the lady whose husband 
stays behind, toiling on in the plains, while swift 



HILL STATIONS 233 

trains or tongas carry his mate towards the region 
of the opportune clouds. She is the angel of that 
mountain paradise. She sometimes descends from it. 

Do you ask me if Anglo-Indian society is immoral ? 
In any case, it does not like to be told so. It has 
never forgiven Kipling for his satires, full of sym- 
pathy and humanity though they might be. In all this, 
it has shown a certain stupidity, like any " society " 
worthy of the name. When aggravated with cant, 
as in this case, the stupidity becomes worse. The 
writer says to the world : 

" Here are men and women, no more, no less, 
whom you do not know. Their joys, their struggles, 
their sorrows, the pathos of their life of battle and 
exile : all these I have endeavoured to depict so that 
they may be felt and lived by others who would love 
them. I have given life to this motley crowd ; 
behind its apparent vulgarities I have shown the 
passion, the force that were not yet aware of them- 
selves ; I have smiled at its deformities, but I have 
dignified them by telling the cause of them ; I have 
forgiven its weaknesses while describing them, for 
you will have understood that, at heart, I felt a few 
ioys, even those of love, to be the due of those 
devoted victims my brothers." 

And the society thus depicted, or at least its 
austere minority, for most of them are good people 
who make no pretence, replies : 

" No, we are virtuous, we are pure, we are ever 
so pure. We do not know the taste of fermented 
liquor. Our wives never go off with a terttum quid. 



234 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Our sisters are citadels from whose ramparts waves 
the banner of propriety. We delight in seeing our 
families increase. We are in no single respect behind 
England, or even Scotland. Shame upon the un- 
grateful person who turns against the breast that 
nursed him ! " 

When all is said, then, is Anglo-Indian society 
immoral ? Well, speaking in the sincerity of his 
heart, the traveller answers, No, it is not. I do not 
wish to discourage anybody, but, in a word, it is 
not. In any case, it is no worse than any other, but 
every one knows every one else and everything is 
known. And so we have feeble rumours with loud 
echoes and scandals stifled neither in ignorance nor 
in indifference. But it is not true that a certain subal- 
tern, after a season spent in the company of a 
smuggled sister, will reappear at the other end of 
the country with the sister in question promoted to 
the rank of his lawful spouse ; it is not true that 
certain wives of officials have been heard, at the 
Simla charity-bazaars, to indulge in such unseemly 
questions as, " Who was it that used to keep you 
last year, dear ? " it is not true that you some- 
times hear of the sudden elopement of Mrs. X. with 
Captain Z., nor that Venice and Monte Carlo 
conceal idylls born under the deodars of the Hima- 
layas ; it is not true that, at the dances, they 
arrange cosy retreats, known by the Hindustani 
name of kala-jagas and containing only two chairs 
and a lamp, sometimes with a limited supply of oil. 
In any case, it is a calumny as far as the two chairs 



HILL STATIONS 235 

are concerned ; I know, because I have been there : 
there is only one. 

Putting easy irony on one side, I believe that 
English or Anglo-Indian society may be regarded 
as superior, from the point of view of morals, to our 
own. It is taken for the greater part (although the 
best families send their younger sons into the 
cavalry and the civil service) from the English 
middle-classes, which in no way profess the amiable 
unconstraint of the aristocracy or the easy morals of 
the lower orders. Those exiles, those pioneers, 
those expert handlers of men spring from pro- 
vincial, religious, respectable England, with its 
narrow ideas and its unshaken principles, a dull 
class, with no sense of art, but solid, conscientious 
and containing the indisputable living strength of 
the race. One thing strikes the Latin from the 
first : the men are content, if necessary, to lead 
chaste lives and this without causing surprise. An 
Italian begins to talk women to you within five 
minutes of meeting you ; a Frenchman betrays, if 
only by hints, his constant preoccupation with 
matters of love ; an Englishman is ashamed of 
it or indifferent to it. The word hypocrisy rises 
easily to the lips. But, in truth, this nation is, 
perhaps, the least sensual of all and this is the only 
excuse for its virtue. It is too busy. Its ideals lie 
elsewhere. In one of its novels, the lover, at the 
sea-side with the woman he loves (they have 
returned on a pilgrimage to the spot where their 
first childish avowals were spoken), interrupts his 



236 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

conversation, forgets the woman by his side, because 
he has seen passing through the haze a steamer 
saiHng for the eastern seas. He is carried away 
by the greater instinct, the desire for space and 
adventure; he pensively murmurs to himself: 

"Lucky old tub ! . . . She'll lift the Southern 
Cross in a week . . . Oh, lucky old tub ! " 



3 

The chief of the hill-stations is Simla. It is the 
summer capital for which the viceroy, the Court 
functionaries, the government officials leave Calcutta 
at the end of winter and it is the centre of the 
fashionable world of India. Imagine a Trouville 
containing a Court, a Baden-Baden of officials, of 
officers on leave, of temporary widows, with etiquette, 
with social competition, with an unbridled need of 
distraction, the whole lightly tinged with essential 
snobbery, hierarchical or aristocratic snobbery, both 
so natural. 

Here, Viceregal Lodge represents the centre of 
activity. Garden-parties, balls and receptions alter- 
nate, with the majesty of celestial phenomena, around 
the serene and imperturbable person of " the Great 
Ornamental," the name conferred upon the viceroy 
by an Anglo-Indian satirist whose work, Three 
Weeks in India, shows no respect for the most 
sacred things. In spite of this defect, the little book 
most accurately describes that very special form 
of society, a little anomalous and yet homogeneous, 



SIMLA 237 

at once bristling with officialism and easy-going, 
indulgent, severe and, when all is said, the most 
sympathetic and the easiest of access that exists. 

It loves pleasure. It does not taste it with the 
tip of its lips, in blase fashion, but rushes upon it, 
swallows it greedily, in great mouthfuls, with a fine 
frenzy. The Simla season, like the London season, 
terrifies you with the number of its amusements. 
Breakfasts, tiffins, teas, dinners, cards to leave on 
people whom you have never seen and whose houses 
you can never find, rides, tennis, badminton, official 
dances, private dances, theatres, suppers, more 
dances, a feverish activity that brings chaperons 

to the grave. Look at Miss W passing — she 

is " Dick " to her friends : you know, one of the 

W girls, the twins, the daughter of the jolly 

colonel of the 22nd D.G.s — hurrying with the 
end of her parasol the runners dragging her 
absurd little rickshaw. She hasn't a minute to 
spare, she's on her way to rehearse in The Yeoman of 
the Guard: 

" Oh, Captain So-and-so ! " 

It's So-and-so, that fetching officer of the R.B., 
" such a smart regiment, dear : " it makes as much 
fuss in the world as our own chasseurs a pied. 
Without troubling to salute, he says : 

" You'll kill ihosQ jhampanis. Have you a dance 
left at the Z.s'?" 

" Yes, think so, wait a bit " — she takes out a note- 
book, which she turns over feverishly — "only a 
barn-dance ; I'm sure you hate it." 



238 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

" We'll sit it out." 

" All right, we'll sit it out." 

" Supper ? " 

" At the Pink Hussars." 

" Hang the Pink Hussars I " 

" Poor things ! Come, too." 

" Not asked." 

" I'll take you. They told me to bring a man, if 
I liked." 

" All right. Good-bye." (To the jhampanis) : 
" Jeldi* pigs ! " (To Miss W.) : " Dig in ! ", 

And Miss W trots away behind her team, 

her maidenly heart throbbing with perturbation at 
those ardent words. She has for three seasons at 
Simla aired the promises of an evident marriageable- 
ness and Captain So-and-so is first cousin to an earl. 
He, on his side, brings his polo-pony to a canter 
and says to himself: 

" That Dick's a damned good sort." 

He will propose to her to-night, perhaps. 

It all depends on the Pink Hussars' supper. 

Meanwhile, the daughter of the dashing colonel 
of the D.G.s goes and gets fined by the terrible 

Major (do not let us give him away), who this 

year manages the theatricals of the first amateur 
dramatic society of Hindustan (a regular theatre, 
with splendid scenery and dresses, calculated to 
make our boulevard theatres blush, if they had not 

forgotten how). Miss W does a skirt-dance. 

Why ? Because she performs this skirt-dance in a 
* Quick ! 



SIMLA 239 

noteworthy manner, that is all. I cannot remember 
exactly where it was to be introduced, but the major 
succeeded in fitting it in somehow. 

And so the major fits the skirt-dance in and mops 
his face and the rickshaw tears off. Eight more 
calls; two teas, sweets at Peliti's for to-morrow's 
dinner, sign the visiting-book at Viceregal Lodge 
for the whole family, a curb-chain for Queenie, 
three rupees' worth of flowers and the comic song 
which that fetching Captain So-and-so always sings 
and which he is sure to forget to-morrow night (it 
has a terrible accompaniment with two flats) ! 



CHAPTER XI 

ON THE SLOPES OF THE HIMALAYAS- 
GULMARG 

Our hill-station is a calmer one. One might describe 
it as a cheap little hole, only it happens to be 10,000 
feet above the level of the sea. Life has not the 
same intensity as at Simla ; there is no question of 
palace-riots among the A.D.C.s, those rebels with 
their sudden attacks of influenza when they are 
called upon to get into uniform to trot round the 
charming Americans of Her Excellency's family; I 
have seen none of those fatal women (sometimes 
rudely described by the generic name of Simla 
harpies), with their troops of tumultuous admirers, 
who prevent the young engineers or boy subalterns 
from working for several generations. 

The Engadine has no greener table-lands, no more 
majestic gorges than this spur of the Himalayas in 
which our hill-station nestles. But everything here 
is on a different scale from the Engadine. Three 
hundred square miles of country, the loveliest 
valley in Asia, lie stretched at our feet, enclosed in 
a wall of snow-capped mountains as tall as Mont 
Blanc, commanded by a peak of 20,000 feet, while a 



ON THE SLOPES OF THE HIMALAYAS 241 

more distant summit looks down upon them from 
the height of its inviolate snows at almost 26,000 
feet in the sky. 

We are surrounded by giant pines, which climb up 
the mountain slopes behind us until they reach the 
zone where the yellowing snows of the past winter 
are melting. It is the time of the monsoons; The 
south wind drives across the peninsula all the 
vapours hung by the equatorial summer over the 
Indian Ocean ; on striking the barrier of the Hima- 
layas, they burst into torrents of rain, deluges 
beyond our powers of conception : there are spots in 
Bengal where the annual rainfall attains the depth of 
a three-storeyed house. And panting India breathes 
again after the hell that is her summer. 

Here, on the northern slope of the spur of the 
Himalayas on which we stand, we do not have to 
endure the first assault of the armies of Indra, the 
cloud-compeller. Nevertheless, the valley before us 
is sometimes only a lake of dark mists with eddying 
ripples that flow from wall to wall, riddled with con- 
tinuous lightning-flashes amid the roll of distant 
thunders. Towards evening, they sometimes lift and 
the setting sun gilds their lower edges, while the 
valley appears quite green, marvellously clear and 
distinct, with each rice-plantation like a sheet of gold, 
the immense plain with its crops, its woods, its 
waters, the three lakes which the river joins together 
with a divine curve. 

In a basin of verdure, among the deodars, the 
little wooden houses are scattered like toys from the 

Q 



242 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Black Forest. One obtains a curious impression of 
artificiality from this human encampment gallantly 
hooking its absurd huts on the eternal flanks of 
the mountain, where its members indulge in their 
little movements of activity and pleasure around 
the tiny steeple that groups and absolves them. 
The Mohammedan who watches them asks his God 
with a smile to damn them to all eternity; higher 
up, in the region where the bearded vultures circle 
in the sky, the Hindu rishi, lost in the meditations 
of the uncreated, has never caught sight of them from 
the threshold of his retreat. 

Look at them, though, so little stirred by the irony 
of these things. The too-green grass, the bright 
dresses of the women, the Hght clothes of the men 
are like a " chromo," an animated chromo, full of 
movement. The wooden barn which they call the 
Club forms the centre. Beside it stands a group of 
horses and syces, in front of the tennis and bad- 
minton-nets. On either side of these, men and 
women, armed with rackets, jump about as though 
trying to catch a herring at the end of a string; 
Others play cricket. Mysterious groups wander 
about pieces of ground. They look as though they 
were hunting for mushrooms. No, they are playing 
golf. Over there, two horsemen are playing at 
racing. Two terriers also are playing at frightening 
a stray calf. Squadrons of polo-players charge with 
a clash, seem to hurl themselves upon a tragic fate. 

Except for the terriers, there is something harsh, 
something strained in this general atmosphere of re- 



ON THE SLOPES OF THE HIMALAYAS 243 

creation. These people are not amusing themselves, 
but taking exercise. An Englishman spends a part of 
his childhood, of his boyhood, of his manhood and 
even of his old age in running after balls, on 
foot or on horseback. He will always do so, with 
the same seriousness and the same conscientiousness 
as though the fate of the empire depended upon it. 
At bottom, he is right : the fate of the empire does 
depend on it ; but I imagine that the young Greeks 
in the stadium, who had every reason to think the 
same on the subject of their country, applied them- 
selves to athletics with a less gloomy energy. 

The struggle for life shows less shame in these men 
whose chief pleasures are those of the will. They 
will climb a mountain to pick a flower at the sum- 
mit and perhaps forget to smell the flower. They 
will have lived strenuously, yet only half lived. 
They will have missed life's sweetness ; those who 
live to enjoy will have missed hardly more : machines 
of the will or machines of sensation grind out much 
the same total of happiness and usefulness. 

But how keen is that instinct for struggling, for 
competition, in the English ! It is the old, old 
instinct, which demands that, even in one's recrea- 
tions, the essential pleasure shall consist in "beat- 
ing " another. We find it, for that matter, the same 
in the scrimmages at foot-ball or polo as in our own 
favourite outdoor game, dominoes. But here it 
invades everything. That young couple who have 
just been dancing leave the room puffing, perspiring, 
glowing with happiness. They look as though they 



244 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

had been splitting wood. They have danced longer 
than all the others ! Even in conversation, we find 
the same spirit of emulation ; and also in wit. The 
latter has as its basis the anecdote, the story ; it is 
a question of telling the best one ; I have sat 
through terrible dinners. . . . But the Americans 
are worse. 

In the open tent from which we watch the players, 
the men drink, write out slips, talk of racing chal- 
lenges, glands and spavins. Over there, Polly, that 
charming girl whom nobody knows except by her 
Christian name, is having a gallop between two 
admirers. She is a decided young person. They 
say that she is just engaged for the third time. 
Those " subs " are not hard to please (one of them 
tells me that it is three years since he met a white 
woman to speak to) and the mess dinners are a 
potent aid towards the crystallization of an ideal. 
And in this way marriages are arranged which turn 
out well, pretty often. 

A dandy passes, a sort of hammock in which a 
languid beauty is carried by four bearers and which 
calls up vague reminiscences of a town ambulance ; 
next come two ladies followed by a slave to carry 
their rackets and walking to their diversions of 
pleasure or love with 30-inch strides. In the veran- 
dah of the Club, the clergyman, a special type, 
whom I recognize by his neat little snuff-coloured 
suit, asks a girl to keep a dance for him, while from 
within comes the manly voice of a lady in glasses, 
with an intimidating air, who is shouting to the 



ON THE SLOPES OF THE HIMALAYAS 245 

Hindu pundit of the library, the timid guardian of 
Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard, to have a chit*' 
conveyed to John Thomas Sahib, who is wanted for 
golf. 

Down below, on the brink of the stream, among 
the red cows, the Mohammedan says his prayers, 
turning towards the sun dying over the mountain- 
tops, and strikes the grass with his forehead ; higher 
up, in the region where the bearded vultures circle 
in the sky, the ascetic is lost to movement in the 
fascination of an inner star; and Polly, smacking 
her boot with her riding-whip, trots home, 
whistling : 

When the little pigs begin to fly . . . 
* A note. 



CHAPTER XII 

A POET OF INDIA 

If you grant that a poet may be defined as the 
consciousness of his race, you will admit that this 
formula fits Rudyard Kipling closely. No doubt, 
there are others at once more exact and more com- 
prehensive ; let us reject none of them. But there 
are men who deserve to have definitions invented 
for them. 

Has England ever had a national poet, an inspired 
singer who discovered the rhythm of the whole 
English life, who unravelled its general harmony 
and raised it to the dignity of beauty ? I think not. 
If we except a phenomenon in the general order of 
things like Shakspeare, singers of the soil like 
Burns or Wordsworth, a bard laden with honour 
and glory like Tennyson, we may say that, in 
England, the poet has played the part rather of an 
outlaw. Without mentioning Marlowe, look at 
Byron, cursing his country which exiled him ; 
Shelley, expelled from Oxford for atheism, wander- 
ing from sea to sea across Italy; Coleridge, who 
grew old, suspected after the eccentricities of his 



A POET OF INDIA 247 

youth, seeking refuge in the fumes of opium. Once 
dead, their country recognized them and took them 
back to her breast : comes the turn of Westminster 
Abbey, birthday-books, marble monuments, every 
manner of expiation ; but, upon the upshot, one is 
tempted to beheve that she prefers her artists post- 
humous and sometimes kills them for the pleasure 
of stuffing them. 

But this one, surely, she never can slight ? She 
endeavours to do so, notwithstanding, from habit. 
You will be told that Kipling is vulgar, that he is not 
art ; he, himself, in a piece in one of his volumes of 
verse, replies, with his quiet irony, to the objection, 
Is it Art ? Also, it is quite natural that cant should 
take alarm, for none was ever less of a hypocrite 
than this free genius. And yet how respectful he 
remains towards this cant, from the point of view of 
morals, which is more important in this country than 
that of principles, and what were one not entitled to 
expect from this prodigious gift of life, if it could 
have been exercised in a less limited sphere of 
passion, with the boldness and the frankness of a 
Maupassant, for instance ! 

Nevertheless, his already immense popularity is 
bound to last. There are important reasons for this, 
reasons that do not lie outside this nation or this 
present stage of its development. Speaking more 
clearly, one might say that the artist is distinctly 
placed in his race and his period. A singular piece 
of good fortune, thanks to which there is no waste in 
the emotion which he communicates, for he comes 



248 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

into immediate contact with the public, and no ex- 
hausting novitiate with the elect I I do not doubt but 
that this conception of glory will appear inelegant, 
tainted with Yankeeism to the purists, to those who 
look upon the Calvary of the precursors or the Tower 
of Ivory of the solitaries as the only possible plat- 
form from which to address posterity. And yet I 
think that we must accept it. Under examination, it 
may seem fine and logical. 

What Rudyard Kipling has felt is the indefatigable 
and admirable effort of the Anglo-Saxon race and all 
the poetry that lies therein. In his work we hear 
the sound of " the seven seas " of the planet under 
the daring keel of the ships of England, of the gold 
on the merchant's counter, of the shrill fifes and the 
Afghan bullets, of the banjo of the settler who, 
beside the dying embers, sings songs of exile " to 
the naked stars." 

But his patriotism implies neither the narrowness 
nor the want of understanding which are its purest 
forms with us. Let no mistake be made : according 
to men's temperaments, there is one mother-land 
that reigns above all others. For a Renan, it would 
be Truth ; for a Kipling, it is Action. This love of 
energy is the very axis of his mind. I find a proof of 
this in a piece in his first volume, Departmental Ditties^ 
in which he lays down this dogma of the! brotherhood 
of the brave. In this way he would be led to that 
almost fatal termination of all higher contemporary 
thought which is hero-worship. 

But he is no dreamer. 



A POET OF INDIA 249 

Nothing is simpler than his conception of life, 
than his excuse for man's duration. The universe is 
a conflict of activities, with the will of man at the top. 
All the poetry and all the joy of life are in man's 
struggle to preserve this dominion either by bold 
risks or patient toil. All nature bends to do homage 
to him who is her conscience and her master. The 
very wreck, half foundered, says : 

Man made me and my will 
Is to my makers still, 

Whom now the currents con, the rollers steer- 
Lifting forlorn to spy 
Trailed smoke along the sky, 

Falling afraid lest any keel come near ! 

Who would not, in such circumstances, have ex- 
pected to come upon variations on the inanity of 
human effort? 

Therefore, man carries the eternal youth of his 
struggle through the eternal youth of the world, 
stands amazed at its sights, subdues its elements. 
Paradise, says Kipling, in so many words, will be the 
star where men will work, without weariness, for the 
sole pleasure and the sole reward of working. 

It is very natural that a philosophy of this kind 
should hold scruples cheaply. Courage and perse- 
verance become the cardinal virtues. This may lead 
us far. Upon the whole, we should end by finding, 
if we pushed this argument to its extreme results, 
that strenuous action forgives all motives; and, if we 
dared to question Mr. Kipling as to what is at the back 
of his thought, I believe that he would answer ; 



250 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIEE 

" Yes, I consider that the aesthetic enjoyment re- 
sulting from the performance or the spectacle of an 
heroic deed is such as to permit us entirely to dis- 
regard its ethical significance." 

I doubt whether his style will be recognized in this 
reply ; but his thought is there. Laclos wrote : 

" That is so like men I All equally rascally in 
their designs, the weakness which they display in 
the execution they christen probity." 

But that is French cynicism. Listen to a German 
kinsman : 

" Man is a being who wishes to go beyond 
himself." 

This phrase belongs to a man who, by dint of 
going to the end of his mind, went out of it : Friedrich 
Nietzsche. There really exists a rhythm of thought 
and I leave the reader to verify these concords. 
Kipling, without tracking the idea as far as Nietzsche, 
stopped at art ; but he followed the same road. 

He has not passed its tragic stage, where Zara- 
thustra relieved himself, in his ascent towards the 
light, of the burden of pity. However unchristian 
in his tendencies, he is still made up of Christianity 
and he is wrapped to his very heart in the evan- 
gelical shroud. He is capable of manly pity as well 
as courageous pessimism. In the fight, he lingers 
over the victims. His tenderness goes out to the 
obscure, if not to the humble, to the outlaws, to the 
unresigned. And, by one of those contradictions 
which, when all is said, are the salt of a human 
mind, he professes a respect for the Law in many a 



A POET OF INDIA 251 

passage of his books. One would say a sort of social 
morality (so stubbornly is the moralizing and preach- 
ing element implanted in an Englishman), tempered 
with tolerance and even with inclinations for in- 
dividuals. 

Rudyard Kipling's works have been well received 
in France. He is so different from us : how could 
we avoid liking him ? We are still allowed to possess 
a certain acuteness of critical perception, a gift of com- 
prehension (I was reading its praises in an English 
review, in connection with M. de La Sizeronne's 
work on Ruskin) which our enemies might compare 
among themselves with that lucidity of vision which 
is traditionally ascribed to the dying. Any form of 
originality makes a claim upon us. Place that equation 
of happiness in juxtaposition, by way of contrast, with 
that of an Anatole France, for instance. I take this 
name as summing up the tendencies, the acquire- 
ments and the grace of the French intelligence of 
our day. It is more than a name : it expresses the 
whole movement initiated by Renan. And no soil 
but ours could produce that quaUty of genius. To 
its eyes, ideas carry weight only through what they 
destroy ; it is absolutely negative. Kiphng, on his 
side, is absolutely positive. We thus enjoy the 
dangerous pleasure of being able to appreciate such 
diverse forms of intellect and art, reflecting that the 
signs o^ phis and minus , in algebra, lose all meaning 
before the sign of infinity . . . 

What I have not mentioned, in the impossibility 
of defining its strength, is the accent, the poignancy, 



252 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

the impassioned soberness of Rudyard Kipling's 
style. It has a certain directness, a familiarity that 
remains dignified, the manliest vigour. That per- 
sonal modesty, that absence of sentimental show, the 
profound vibration of a sympathy and of an imagina- 
tion served by means of a startling simplicity : all 
this goes to make up an art which one loves with 
something more than one's critical sense and which, 
beyond the regions of literary emotion, reaches, one 
would say, the deep layers of sensibility, the sacred 
domain of the unconscious which analysis has never 
been able to profane, to which philosophy, after so 
many vain flights, humbly returns in order to grope 
for the solutions so ardently desired. 



CHAPTER XIII 
PRINCES 



The Maharajah of B is twenty-five years old. 

He was no sooner seated on his throne, in the old 
city that reflects its mud ramparts in the green moat 
where crocodiles swim lazily to and fro, than he 
determined to live, to profit by his newly-acquired 
notions of British culture. That is why he set him- 
self to quaff great goblets of a mixture of whisky, 
champagne and benedictine. This gave something 
amusingly limp to his administration. 

The resident complained. The viceroy was roused. 
So much so that the young prince was deposed for 
a time and the government of his States transferred 
to the durbar, or privy council, only casually inspired 
by the most affable of political agents. One more 
failure to be laid to the score of European education. 



Few things can be more curious than to examine 
the different effects which EngUsh ideas and influence 



2 54 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

produce upon the minds of these eastern potentates. 
The effects are infinitely varied and sometimes per- 
turbing. The Indian princes may be divided into 
two groups : the conservatives, hostile to western 
ideas, steeped in the old principles, and the moderns, 
better trained, knowing the price of the favours of 
the suzerain race and presenting every shade' of 
moral degradation, while enjoying no real advantage 
beyond that of being quite as much suspected by 
their master as the rajahs of the old school and more 
despised. The English have not forgotten that the 
Nana Sahib, the terrible butcher of the Mutiny, was the 
most civilized of the princes, speaking their language, 
entertaining them in the European fashion with all 
the refinement of western urbanity. The same 
women's fingers whose rings he had admired or 
whose fan picked up on some evening of an official 
entertainment at the Residency in Lucknow may 
have written, steeped in their blood, those words of 
despair and farewell which the rescuers, arriving too 
late, found inscribed on the walls of the prison at 
Cawnpore, or have been chopped off, in the presence 
of the Nana himself, on the kerb of the tragic well 
where they struggled, amid what entreaties ! . . . 
All the East lies revealed in these contrasts. 

There are some contrasts as pronounced among 
the products of English education, or rather its 
attempts, for the groping stage is not yet past. The 
less intelligent have been struck by the thrilling and 
respectful tones in which the English say of a man 
that he is " a good sportsman." That ideal appears 



PRINCES 255 

to them both enviable and accessible. Whether 
this be due to sincerity or the desire to please 
matters not : they have their polo-teams, their 
cricket elevens, their triumphant sports of all kinds. 

The Maharajah of is unrivalled at pig-sticking. 

He has given further pledges to western influence : 
he has married his trainer's daughter. In the 
society of the English officers who do not object 
to drinking his champagne, he has adopted the 
supreme smartness of talking military slang. He 
expresses himself in the language of a " sub " fresh 
from Sandhurst and calls you " old chap." Delicious 
phrases have been attributed to him, including the 
following on the subject of the insubordination of 
the Hindu peoples : 

" We ought to have a new mutiny to put down. 
Those niggers " — mark you, his own fellow country- 
men ! — " want another lesson." 

The elegance and dignity of this remark make it 
lapidary, worthy of being inscribed on the frontal of 
the temple of the new Law. Let us be just, however: 

old-fashioned monarchs will tell you that 

is not "born," that he comes of the juggler caste 
and that he occupies a throne only by the whim 
of fate and the will of England. We must believe 
it. We must believe everything in this land where 
everything happens. 



256 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



3 

The Maharajah of M — ■ — had as his tutor an old 
EngHsh colonel, not old enough. They travelled in 
Europe together. The Maharajah brought back a 
wonderful collection of photographs with him. Since 
that time, he suffers life in his States anything but 
gladly. Modest England opposes the importation 
of white women. The Maharajah is an unhappy 
man. When he exhibits his collection, he reminds 
his visitor of a schoolboy taking Mile, de Merode's 
photograph from his desk to show you. For the 
rest, he retains a charming barbaric ingenuousness. 



4 

The ruler of C is more interesting to the 

psychologist and the inquirer. He believes in the 
transmigration of souls and corresponds with Marie 
Corelli, the too-well-known authoress. Small and 
mean-looking, he worships in himself the unresigned 
soul of a hero of Greek antiquity. At night, on the 
margin of the lake where stand the colossal ruins of 
the cities built by his ancestors, he dreams vague 
and fruitless dreams. It is over there, very far away, 
in the heart of Central India, in the Bundelkund 
country. Epic palaces and conquerors' tombs 
crumble on the mountains and on the banks of the 
mighty rivers which we cross on elephant-back. 
This strange king reminds one of a Louis of Bavaria, 



PRINCES 257 

a romantic prince of Hindu legend. But the likeness 
is not quite the same, even though the background 
to the picture have an even more mysterious and 
distant grandeur. A fatal absurdity hangs threaten- 
ingly over all. Sometimes, on days when he feels 
bored, the maharajah dresses himself as a highlander 
or a ballet-girl. Then he sits on his throne and all 
his Court, by way of expressing its admiration, 
says: 

''Wah/ Wah! Wah!'' 

The ranees, always neglected, look at him in 
wonder, applaud him from behind the marble screen 
of the pavilion with the faded hangings. One is 

a daughter of the Rajah of O , each of whose 

ancestors used annually to spend a third of his 
revenue on the festivals of the marriage of the sala- 
grama stone with the tulsi plant. The elephants, 
in the court-yard, on the brick terraces, near the 
rusty cannon, heap little piles of forage on their 
heads, for they fear the strokes of the lingering sun. 
Through the open bay, the Maharajah sees the 
ruined palace and the tombs of his conquering 
ancestors, in the middle of the pool where the 
waterfowl rise before the recruiting-officer's duck- 
gun. The great fruit-eating vampires, which have 
hung all day in angry clusters from the trees on 
the bank, now fly away, one by one, noiselessly, 
and skim over the water of the lake strewn with 
little bulb-domed kiosks. Then where are you, O 
heroic Greece, and you, Miss Marie Corelli ? 

And, sadder, the Maharajah, full of unutterable 



2 58 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

doubts, crosses a lean calf in its pale silk covering 
over a pointed knee. The muslin skirts puff out, the 
prince dreams, while ghosts of warriors and battles 
float amid the twilight and the sleepy " Wah ! 
Wah ! " of the ranees and the Court rises with the 
smoke and smells of the bazaar. . . . 



5 

Very different is the audience which His Highness 

of B is good enough to grant me. I arrive 

through the barbicans and posterns of a sinister- 
looking, tumble-down palace. Under the gateway, 
on the left, a beggar thrusts out his hand, while, on 
the right, the hastily-mustered guard oddly presents 
the bayonets which it has not had time to fix at the 
end of its rifle-barrels and a trumpeter produces a 
few hoarse sounds. The officer who presents me is 
the inspector of the troops of the imperial service 
and explains to me that he has nothing to do with 
the private guard of the Maharajah. The latter 
joins us, after a minute, in the hideously-furnished 
room, with its semi-European style ; he is out of 
breath, he has been running, he is lost in excuses 
for keeping the English officer waiting, insists with 
a vapidness that leaves nothing to be wished for. I 
feel somewhat neglected in this distribution of 
apologies, but my influence is naturally less powerful 
than the captain's to have the guddee, or throne, 
restored to this unemployed prince. He has a 
rather attractive face and is dressed all in yellow. 



PRINCES 259 

for it is the feast of Vasant Panchami : a long 
tunic of flowered satin, a yellow muslin turban with 
little flowers, patent-leather pumps, a stick with a 
silver crutch. We exchange remarks in which the 
triteness of the West is multiplied by the impene- 
trability of the East until they attain an intensity of 
futility that is almost beautiful. This is the general 
tone of the relations permitted between the two 
races. The monarchs observe it in their palaces, 
the women in their alcoves. We must needs be 
resigned. It is the same in every rank of society. Our 
curiosity appears to them idle, indifferent and often 
ridiculous. We ourselves do not interest them. In 
a letter written by a holy man who was brought up 
in England, who graduated at Cambridge and who 
now lives quite naked in the Country of the Five 
Rivers and flees like a zebra across the Himalayas 
when a tourist asks to see him, I have read a sen- 
tence in which the orientalists of our civilization 
were described as " glow-worms that take their light 
only from the surrounding darkness. . . ." How 
pleasant I 

The dancing-girls have been sent for. In spite 
of the profound boredom which the native dances 
provoke in every EngHshman, the captain makes 
this sacrifice to my globe-trotting curiosity. A 
famous star is here from Agra, for the festival. 
She sings, first with monotonous gestures of the 
hands : expostulations, remonstrances. A sunbeam 
enters through the blinds and at times fastens on 
the ring which she wears on her thumb and which is 



26o THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

mounted with a little mirror. The musicians — three 
hurdy-gurdies, a drum, a set of bells — sit round her, 
prompt her in a very actress's-motherly manner- 
Then a bound forward and poses : she squats down, 
only a bent knee quivers of all her motionless person, 
quivers so as to shake the six rows of bells round 
her ankle, which sing with a rippling shudder. 

She wears stockings, a civilized detail that shocks 
us, and, when we ask her for the famous Persian song, 
that Taza be taza which is a classic in the repertory of 
every nauchni of Hindustan, she limits herself to re- 
peating indefinitely the first couplet and an impression 
of melancholy and of artificiality comes to us from 
those mechanical movements from which a soul has 
fled, the soul of the East, of a beautiful corpse that 
is still adored. 

But the youngest of the troop had a strange voice 
like a very young boy's, wore an orange scarf over 
a black skirt worked with silver wire and I loved the 
fascination of her serious mouth while the child 
turned, turned, one finger on her temple, her bare 
toes, covered with rings, clutching at the flowers of 
the hideous carpet. 

How many more times yet will the shifting scene 
of life, of civilizations, of cults change around frail 
and imperishable beauty ! 



CHAPTER XIV 

KAPURTHALA 

It is some years since Paris society first cast eyes 
upon the Maharajah of Kapiirthala, at a great ball 
given by the Princesse de Sagan. He and the 
young Duchess of Aosta were the great attractions 
of the evening. I see him now, very tall, resplen- 
dent with gems under his light-coloured turban, 
talking to the lovely duchess with the Napoleonic 
profile. The Maharajah was paying his first visit 
to France, realizing his fondest dream, for this right 
loyal feudatory of the Emperor of India has for our 
country a feeling of the most touching and, at the 
same time, the most flattering affection. This love 
was born and took shape in the course of an un- 
eventful youth and indeed sprang from vague data, 
the result of reading and oral recitals. It was the 
love of Geoffroy Rudel for the Princesse Lointaine, 
cherished on the strength of a portrait. In spite of 
gloomy forebodings — his grandfather, sailing for 
England, had died on the Red Sea — the Prince 
embarked on board ship as soon as he had attained 
his majority. His religion, which is that of the 
Sikhs, did not forbid him to cross the "Black 



262 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Water," as the Hindus call the sea. He would have, 
on his return, neither to pay the priests his weight 
in precious matter nor to sleep for a week, for his 
purification, inside a golden cow. 

When he returned home from his tour through 
Europe and America, he remained faithful to his first 
love and no city that he visited left so powerful a 
memory on his mind as Paris. He quitted the 
picturesque old palace of white or yellow stucco, 
where his life as a melancholy heir-apparent had 
been spent, for a new residence built after his own 
designs and called the Palace of the Elysde. Beside 
it, a pavilion, where the little princes live with their 
French governess, assisted by two young English- 
women, bears the name of Armenonville. Even so 
did captive Andromache console herself by giving 
to the torrents of Epirus the names of Scamander 
and Simois. 

Since then, Kapurthala has become a centre of 
hospitality, at once sumptuous and cordial, for 
Frenchmen travelling in India. They there find 
their tongue spoken to perfection by the sovereign, 
studied by his Court, playing an essential part, by 
his order, in official education throughout the length 
and breadth of his States. They there find the cult 
of their civilization, their rarest wines, the portraits 
of their most irreproachable beauties. A palace deco- 
rated with talc reliefs, with silver reflections on a 
blue ground, is set aside as a guest-house for visitors 
(as among most of the Indian princes), and furnished 
with all the resources of European luxury ; and there 



KAPURTHALA 263 

is even a club (once a dissenting place of worship), 
which, with its books and newspapers, provides for 
the needs of the mind. 

Another larger palace contains the Durbar Hall, 
employed for audiences and solemn deliberations, 
where the prince, with an unusual sense of modernity, 
has had a skating-rink installed. Here, at six 
o'clock on week-day evenings. His Highness invites 
his guests. The military band plays waltzes, the 
roller-skates hum under the echoing vaults, you are 
haunted by vague reminiscences of the Palais de 
Glace and you undergo a complicated series of 
impressions. Tennis alternates with rinking and is 
played beside the palace. The music is then moved 
to a neighbouring band-stand. The Maharajah is a 
crack tennis-player, as the frequenters of the He de 
Puteaux will remember. 

At other times he goes to " the Villa," a sort of 
Trianon which he has built at a few miles from his 
capital and which resembles the maisons des champs 
strewn on the hillsides of Sevres or Ville d'Avray. 
There is then a procession of great solemn landaus 
along the new road which commands a view of the 
immense horizon of the Punjab, with its waving corn- 
fields as of an oriental Beauce. 

Jagat Sing is a building prince. At Mussooree, 
his summer residence, he is constructing a huge 
country-seat, in the Renascence style, of which 
marvels are related. In the matter of taste, he 
surpasses all the other native princes, his fellow 
countrymen, whose States I have as yet visited 



2 64 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Seldom shall you find at Kapurthala the horrible 
things which, in the eyes of the progressive rajahs, 
represent the supreme refinements of western genius. 
Perhaps even, one day, he will light upon the noble 
attitude open to a monarch who, having steeped 
himself in modern culture and passed through civili- 
zation in the vainglorious and limited sense which 
we give to the word, should once more, of his own 
free will, become traditional and conservative. 
Not that, as it is, he has broken with all the old cus- 
toms : ' far from it. Thus, the feast of the Holi, the 
Hindu carnival, was celebrated in this as in previous 
years, in the gardens of the old ancestral palace, 
and I was able to see returned to the Treasury 
the gold and silver squirts used by the Maharajah 
and his dignitaries to cover one another with 
water dyed red in the course of those saturnalia 
by whose primitively orgiastic character the first 
travellers to Hindustan were so immensely struck. 
Confetti-throwing is as yet unknown at Kapurthala. 
And what marvels that Treasury contains ! Their 
value must amount to millions of francs. Here are 
the jewels of the deceased ranees, anklets in Rajput- 
ana enamels whose brilliancy exceeds that of any 
enamel of Florence or Limoges, representing serpents, 
flowers,, or full-face elephants' heads ; rings of infinite 
variety, for the fingers and toes, some of them 
mounted with an enormous emerald the size of a five- 
franc piece, which is incrusted, in the centre of the 
huge green stone, with a diamond set in a narrow 
thread of gold ; nose-ornaments and all manner 



KAPURTHALA 265 

of gold and jewelled pins. Here are drinking- 
services in Persian filigree of gold and silver, goblets 
and ewers, in slender, fanciful shapes, adorned with 
verses of Hafiz in which the cup-bearer is exhorted 
to "fill high the bowl" and the poet to sing its 
intoxication; aigrettes for the turban with enamelled 
stalks ending in a scroll of rubies, which are laid on 
to the stuff; state umbrellas in cloth of gold, fringed 
with little pearls, which are carried over the prince 
seated on his elephant ; immense trappings for those 
same elephants, covered with thick embroideries, 
and, for them too, collars of silver vine-leaves, tiger- 
claws mounted two and two, ear-rings shaped Hke 
cymbals. 

The howdahs in which the Maharajah and his dig- 
nitaries sit on solemn occasions are huge platforms 
perched on the back of the elephants and fitted with 
cushions, bolsters and priceless carpets which offer 
their softness to backs wearied by the majestic 
rolling of the ponderous beasts. These howdahs 
are there in dozens, on the floor, like sleighs, their 
silver rectangular balustrades emptied of the costly 
stuffs which we shall be shown elsewhere : one has 
a golden balustrade at least yards four round by 
sixteen inches high. I see also gala housings and 
fly-flappers adorned with plates of gold and with 
enormous cabochons of emeralds cut to resemble 
pine-apples. 

Among the sovereigns who visited the Exhibition 
of 1900, the Parisians were fortunate to see this 
friendly prince, whom it would be impossible to 



2 66 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

suspect of any mental reservation or political 
calculation in his kindly grace, always so will- 
ingly and lavishly displayed. Let us hope for 
many more visitors, highnesses or majesties, who 
are like him. 



CHAPTER XV 

MORE MAHARAJAHS 



Has this one come to the Durbar, this high-priest of 
Krishna, of Krishna who is Kaniya, who is Heri, 
who is Vyasi and so many more besides, this 
Goswami of Nathdwara, this Pontiff of the Rajasthan, 
at whose feet arrive offerings from as far as Samar- 
kand, from the banks of the Volga, from the frozen 
plains of Siberia, and who proudly shows, in the 
official pictures, the Rana of Oodeypore, the premier 
prince of Hindustan, bowing low to receive his 
blessing ? Will he risk his majesty among the 
pollutions of those profane crowds, he who, for fear 
of contamination, never touches the hand of a man 
fed on meat, on whose territory no Hving thing is 
ever killed ? I remember the venerable episcopal 
calash which he sent to the boundary of his States 
and Oodeypore to convey me to Nathdwara, which, 
till then, no Frenchman had, I think, visited. It 
was waiting for me with its four horses under a 
banyan-tree, surrounded by a troop of almost 
naked Bhils (who are the still savage aborigines 



268 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of the country), leaning on bows as tall as them- 
selves. 

Rocked on the violet cushions, I saw the mono- 
tonous landscape fly past me, with its fields of red 
and white poppies which yield the opium, its 
sanctuaries where smirks an idol crowned with 
marigolds and daubed with vermilion, until I 
reached the palace where I was expected and where 
the guard, having no rifles, presented its bayonets, 
as at B , to the foreign guest. 

The customary presents arrived forthwith : ex- 
quisite fruits, all sorts of milk foods (Krishna, the 
lover of the heavenly milkmaids, is pre-eminently a 
pastoral god), sweetmeats scented with essence of 
roses and tuberoses. The dishes were set down on 
the ground of the apartments covered, walls, ceilings 
and floors, with immaculate muslin, where I lived 
for two days on bucolic fare (it would have been in 
bad taste to touch as much as an egg), listening 
through the diaphanous tissues that closed even 
the carved stone trellis-work to the passionate lowing 
and warbling of all the beasts and all the birds of 
this land where men do not kill. 

Introduced into " the Presence," as they say there, 
I felt a certain disillusion at finding not a pontiff of 
the emaciated type (although there is nothing of the 
ascetic about the god Krishna), but a man of a 
sensual and prudent air, not without real ecclesias- 
tical and sovereign dignity under his vestment of 
flowered mauve silk covered by a hood of precious 
stones fringed with emeralds as big as pears in 
midsummer. ... 



MORE MAHARAJAHS 269 

Has he too been seen at Delhi, this most pure 
high-priest of the Player of the Blue Flute, in the 
suite of George V. ? 



The Maharajah of Jeypore, during his stay in 
London, has hired a large house in Kensington, 
furnished in the style of an Anglo-Indian bungalow : 
need I say more ? He is by far the most important 
of the Indian princes who have come to England 
for the coronation ; and, like the Doge of Venice in 
the presence of Louis the Great, he might well 
say: 

" What astonishes me most is to see myself here." 
The expenses of this journey, which is certainly 
the great event of the Maharajah's life, amount to 
;i^750,ooo, of which at least one half goes in presents 
to the King. The rest has secured the use of a 
steam-boat of 7000 tons for the double journey and 
the shipping of a retinue of one hundred and twenty- 
five persons supplied with food prepared according 
to rite and with water from the Ganges sufficient 
for three months' consumption. Enormous sums 
will be paid to the Brahmans on the prince's return 
to his States. As a Hindu who follows his faith 
strictly and scrupulously, he has escaped the 
pollution attached to the crossing of the Black 
Water only by a multiplication of the propitiatory 
and purificatory ceremonies. When he embarked 
at Bombay, sacrifices were offered to the sea : rice, 
fowls, cocoa-nuts, tuberoses and marigolds. When 
he returns to Jeypore, following the old ceremonial 



2 70 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of his ancestors, he will be weighed against his 
weight in gold, which will be distributed among 
the priests. And, for a supreme security, he has 
brought his god with him ! The tutelary idol has 
accompanied the grandson of the sun, across the 
deep, to the fogs of the suzerain Thule. All this 
has necessitated an unprecedented complication of 
rites and ceremonies and delicate transhipments, 
where the essential thing has been to protect '*' the 
Presence " against profane looks and touches. And 
who do you think has undertaken to arrange these 
details ? Mr. Cook in person ! Circular tickets for 
divinities, special trains for Olympus constitute, I 
imagine, a record. After he had " conducted " 
William II. through the Holy Land, one would 
have thought that this colossal man's ambition was 
satiated ; but no, he had taken an emperor to the 
cradle of his God : naught would content him but 
that he should take a god to the sickbed of his 
emperor ! The age is far from commonplace. 

As it is the afternoon, His Highness wears com- 
paratively few diamonds in the hilt of his tulwar in 
its pink-velvet scabbard and from the row of pearls 
round his neck hang only three or four emeralds each 
barely the size of a plover's egg. The fifty years of 
his age bear lightly on his noble and warlike carriage. 
He belongs to the oldest aristocracy in the world, 
to that Rajput nobility which was one of humanity's 
most magnificent successes and which has preserved 
its immutable traditions and all the cult of chivalry 
through centuries of an unparalleled epic, beside 



MORE MAHARAJAHS 271 

which the Homeric frescoes pale. What can com- 
pare with the legends of the three sieges of Chitor,the 
sacred city, the palladium of Hindustan, where waved 
the crimson standard of Mewar, while the warriors 
clad in yellow garments, which mean that they will 
return victorious or not at all, hurl themselves upon 
the camp of the Mogul hordes and, in the under- 
ground temples in which horror has never since ceased 
to dwell, thirteen thousand women and young girls die 
a voluntary death on the funeral-piles of sandal- 
wood ! One must have seen those wonderful ruins, 
now abandoned to the reptiles and the brambles, on 
their hill shaped like a ship's prow and crowned by 
" the ringlet of Chitor," the Tower of Victory of Rajah 
Kumbo, "more terrible than the flame in the dry 
jungle," as the inscription at the top bears witness. 

I cannot refrain from quoting, for love of the 
picturesque, another episode related by the bard 
Chand, the story of the old chieftain who, drunk 
with love and opium, entered the chamber of one of 
the queen's waiting-maids and was betrayed by the 
woman jealous to avenge her honour. During his 
sleep, she tied him by means of his great turban, 
fifteen cubits long, to the charpoy, or pallet-bed, 
where he lay. The enemy break in, the old tiger 
wakes, struggles for a moment against his bonds and 
then, with a prodigious effort, stands erect, with the 
bed on his back like a turtle's shell, and, with the 
aid of a copper vessel, exterminates his discomfited 
enemies at his leisure. 

I do not remember whether the Maharajah of 



2 72 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Jeypore numbers this hero among his ancestors. 
The episode would have suggested, in a curious 
manner, the emblem of the turtle which figures in the 
arms of the Kuchwachas, one of the thirty-two races 
descended from the sun, of which he is the heir of 
line. 

A still more illustrious prince, however, has refused 
to cross the ocean. I refer to the Maharajah of 
Oodeypore, the real King of Kings, hailed as such 
by all India, from the Himalayas to Cape Kumarin, 
the scion of the only Rajput blood that has never 
accepted the ignominy of mingling with the detested 
seed of the sons of Timur, the most magnificent 
Padishahs of Delhi. He has remained in his en- 
chanted palaces and the marble kiosks of the lakes 
that reflect the pink citadels perched on the water- 
side peaks. . . . 

However, His Highness of Jeypore leaves us for 
the India Office, where he is expected by important 
understrappers. And, as this is mail-day, the babu 
secretary goes off to write, in flowery terms, to the 
eunuchs of the zenana to reassure the weeping queens, 
none of whom has accompanied the master and who 
are pensively casting their dice of jade with turquoise 
spots and counting the chances and the lucky num- 
bers in their retreats in the great galleried wells, 
below the level of the sacred pond where the slow 
crocodiles swim, swooning with heat. . . . 



CHAPTER XVI 
TOURISTS, PORTRAITS AND MASQUES 



His Royal Highness is a genial prince and a des- 
perate sportsman, who has arrived in India to kill 
tigers, elephants, bears, the very rare ovis of the 
great plateaus and time. He has come from America, 
where he laid low the terrible grizzly bear in the 
Rocky Mountains and found himself the Meleager of 
a legion of Atalantas of oil or pork. For the rest, he 
is charming, with the slim figure of a young squire 
by Mantegna, not tall, but with supple muscles which 
one suspects to be capable of very quick and sudden 
efforts, and he is curious by reason of the contrast 
of his Latin nature in the midst of the slower Saxons, 
with their infrequent gestures and their massive limbs, 
even as a delicate Florentine rapier among tall two- 
handed swords. His greedy eye takes in every 
detail of the mem-sahibs decked out for the occasion 
and flashes at the sight of the fine curtseys made by 
maidens of a decided bearing, who are not used to it 
and who bob down comically and with an indignant 
air during the reception, while the good prince 



2 74 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

smiles at them with his fine teeth and with his eyes 
where Hngers a trace of the sensuousness of his 
happy country. As for them, in their hearts, they 
think " the little foreigner " good fun. 



Here is an Englishman, exceedingly rich, not ex- 
actly a globe-trotter in the strongest sense of the 
word, but rather a sort of planetary saunterer, a 
cosmopolitan dilettante. His is a type almost un- 
known to our people, disturbing in view of our 
stay-at-home habits, nay more, immoral, even as 
the bird of passage strikes the farm-yard bird as 
immoral. 

This one's special characteristic is that he travels 
about to satisfy not his ambition nor his will, but his 
love of fine sights. He is the gentleman whom we 
meet at Bayreuth, for the Wagner performances, at 
Milan, for Perosi, at Leeds, for Handel or Elgar ; he 
was present at the opening of the Dutuit collection 
in Paris, on the eve of his departure for Bombay ; 
and, though he missed LEtranger at Brussels, he 
was at the dress-rehearsal of Pelleas. He knows 
the whole of the world ; his picturesque house at 
Westminster, whose windows full of old Leeds 
ware, overlook St. James's Park, has seen all the 
elegance and all the talent of the two hemispheres 
pass through its doors. In England, where taste 
is a matter more of discipline than of initiative, he 
exercises a sort of aesthetic judicature and of con- 



TOURISTS, PORTRAITS AND MASQUES 275 

suiting Maecenasship, not that he cares to do so, but 
because the suffrage of the elect invests him with it. 
He has come to the Durbar because it offers an 
unequalled occasion to see India and all the enchant- 
ments of the fabulous East collected in a rare 
apotheosis. He will bring back nicknacks, per- 
haps, if he finds any, a chaotic multitude of gorgeous 
memories and, for his suppers of the coming season, 
a few recipes of the sweet, hot curries as cooked in 
Madras by the half-castes of Goa the Sleepy. 



3 

The terrible American woman has left a track of 
affright in her wake. Baltistan, Dardistan and Kafir- 
istan have witnessed her passage and remain pale and 
trembling. Her coolies, humble long-haired Baltis 
whom she used to pull by their feet from under 
their beds where they hid for fear of the passes 
so difficult to climb under the load of the fair 
explorer's baggage, still show the marks of the nailed 
shoes with which she stimulated their zeal at critical 
moments. Thus did she make her way, escorted by a 
tiny, smiling husband. The mighty glaciers of 
the Karakoram bent low before her ; she crossed the 
Indus and the Shyok on bridges made of three 
strands of wattled willow-branches, or else on a raft 
of inflated goatskins, a mode of transport which I 
recommend to lovers of the picturesque. She chris- 
tened mountains : the mountains are unprotected 
in this country. Henceforth, Mount Clara Bison 



2 76 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

Hangman lifts its virgin, but astonished crest to the 
Himalayan sky. 

And this name, which already renders illustrious 
a brand of canned meats or American " shoes " at 
Chicago, will remain mingled, for a time, with the 
stories of the explorers (all as jealous as old flirts) 
and with the legends told, for centuries to come, 
with lowered voices, by the timid Baltis round the 
fires at the halting-places. " Clara Bison Hangman " 
will become a formula of incantation, of witchcraft, 
employed to conjure up some terrible rakska, or 
demon, of the West. . . . 

To give an idea of the way in which this type of 
foreign woman may strike the oriental imagination 
— and it is a question not only of the American 
travelling lady here named, but of all the energetic 
women over there who help their males to bear the 
White Man's Burden — I will quote an extract from 
a Sanskrit poem, as yet unpubhshed in our language, 
which gives a rather different conception of the 
Eternal Feminine : 

" The Demiurge, after creating the world and man, 
saw that he had no solid element remaining. There- 
upon he took the roundness of the moon, the curves 
of the creeping plant, the embrace of the vine-branch, 
the tremor of the grass, the slenderness of the reed, 
the brilliancy of the flower, the lightness of the leaves, 
the tapering thinness of the elephant's trunk, the 
shudder of the clustering bees, the gladness of the 
sunbeam, the tears of the clouds, the caprice of the 
winds, the timidity of the hare and the pride of the 



TOURISTS, PORTRAITS AND MASQUES 277 

peacock, the softness of the parrot's throat and the 
hardness of the diamond, the sweetness of honey and 
the cruelty of the tiger, the heat of the flame and the 
coldness of snow, the cackle of the jay, the mockery 
of the cuckoo, the hypocrisy of the crane and the 
faithfulness of the wild-duck and, mixing all these 
things together, made them into woman and gave 
her to man." 

4 

Baba means baby. August Hermann Baba was 
only eighteen months old when I knew him down 
there, down there, in the Tibet of the Red Lamas, 
on the plateaus of ice and fire whence the old Indus 
has to scramble down for more than ten thousand 
feet before mingling with the Indian Ocean. 

August Hermann's father is a virtuous Protestant 
missionary, of the sect of the Moravian Brethren, 
married to a young German girl newly arrived from 
Bavaria, just like that, with her three dresses, her 
recipes for pastry and her mother's blessing, to lead 
a blameless life in the heart of Asia with her chosen 
spouse. It is an existence which has its little draw- 
backs, we must admit. For instance, persons who 
are not acclimatized to it' are unable to endure the 
rarefaction of the atmosphere at great altitudes : 
fatal heart-disease declares itself almost invariably. 
In summer, the sun kills you ; in winter, an arctic 
temperature, which cloisters the natives for months 
in a sort of villages that are half burrows, gives the 
whites all the illusion of a polar holiday. As for 



2 78 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

communications, you are at fourteen days' march from 
the capital of Kashmir, whence a three days' carriage- 
drive is barely sufficient to take you to a railway- 
station. That fourteen days' march is done on 
pony-back, sleeping in unlikely lodgings, where often 
a hole in the roof does duty for a chimney. Morfe- 
over, in the great colds, the pass of the Zoji La is not 
to be crossed by everybody. Whole caravans are 
lost in the snow ; running postmen are found in the 
spring squatting on their mail-bags, intact, frozen in 
their goatskin coats, preserved by the cold. Then, 
the picture-postcards from Halle or Tubingen are 
subject to unkind delays. ... 

If even the abundance of the spiritual harvest 
made up for the rigours of this apostleship ! But it 
falls far short of it. A Russian missionary whom I 
met over there confessed to me, in a careless moment, 
that, in thirty-two years, he had effected one solitary 
conversion, that of an old woman in articulo mortis. 
He added that he was not quite sure that she was 
not dead first. 

The Ladaki is impregnable from the religious 
point of view, not in the manner of the high-caste 
Hindu, who politely offers, if that will please the 
missionary, to adopt Christ as a supplementary in- 
carnation of Vishnu, but from sheer inertia. His 
very Buddhism, truly considered, is only a varnish 
spread over a foundation of superstitions as old as 
man's intelligence, probably older. . . . And, to 
crown the humiliation, the Ladakis who change 
their religion all turn Mohammedans ! 



TOURISTS, PORTRAITS AND MASQUES 279 

No matter, August Hermann cuts his teeth rocked 
by his Tibetan nurse, aged eight years and named 
Singhi, the lioness. She has an Eskimo appear- 
ance, a broad, cheerful face and, all day long, sings 
strange songs about the Devils of the Passes and 
young girls whose figures are like " the bells of the 
lamaseries." When she is a little bigger, she will 
don the hood embroidered with rough turquoises 
and take her three official husbands on the May 
pilgrimages. And, on the wild wormwood, under 
the shade of the apricot-trees, they will sit and 
quaff their chang, which is fermented barley-beer, 
or else tea boiled for three days with butter and 
soda, or perhaps the bewitched nectar of the distant 
lands of Thule, the whisky of the conqueror. 

Poor little August Hermann, offspring of chaste 
nuptials, there is but too great a chance that, by 
that time, you will be sleeping in the small cemetery 
of Leh, in the bend of the infidel torrent which, a 
little higher, turns the praying- wheel in the orchard 
of the heathen monks. May the Lord Buddha, 
whom the vain and guilty machine invokes night 
and day, succour your little Protestant soul set free 
so far from its paradise ! 



5 
It is mortally cold in the dark temple * where the 
lanterned dome hardly allows the light of an evening 

* The lamasery of Hamis, where I saw this " devil-dance," 
has at its head a Kushok who comes from Lhasa and is 



28o THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of exile to fall from the top of its four red pillars on 
things never seen. Outside, the willows are dimly 
marked on the sloping sides of the valley ; the flat 
roofs of the monastery scarce outline against the 
almost extinct sky the quaint petticoated cylinders 
which stand at their corners and whose streamers 
and yak-tails are stirred by no breath of wind ; a 
mist fills the valley and the only luminous thing left 
is, twenty thousand feet in the sky, like a cone of 
supernatural lava, the snowy and golden ridge of 
the Donga Pa. 

In the half-dusk of the room, we make out a huge 
silver tabernacle, of undefinable shape, which con- 
tains relics. The glimmer of a night-light floating 
in the middle of a lump of clarified butter shows 
the repousse-work of the metal with its interwoven 
lotuses, thunderbolts, dragons, harpies and lions 
playing on cymbals. 

Beyond the arches of red and gold-lacquered wood, 
through wonderful silks hanging in strips at the edge 
of the secret recesses, behind kakemonos large as 
suburban gardens, we distinguish mural paintings: 
rishis sleeping in a circle of cut heads ; black gods 
embracing sky-blue goddesses ; wise men feeding a 
jackal on their own flesh ; the divine Han-Chi, of 
whom all creatures that live are born and who opens 
an eye in each of her thousand palms. . . . 

Suddenly, a deafening music bursts forth. Squat- 
ting lamas, in red felt mitres with ear-flaps, bang 

numbered as one of the most illustrious in Tibet. It is at a 
few days' march from Leh, the capital of Ladak. 



TOURISTS, PORTRAITS AND MASQUES 281 

long-bodied drums with curved sticks, beat timbals, 
blow into brass-belled hautboys, into conchs brought 
from the Chinese gulfs across the whole of Asia, into 
silver trumpets five yards long. The monstrous 
melopoeia starts forms in the shadow. Successively 
there issue from the darkness of the pillars ten 
mute apparitions, covered with silks heavily em- 
broidered with grinning mouths of chimeras and 
demons. Above are frightful and grotesque masks : 
a distorted face with a diadem of skulls ; another 
which has only half a face and through whose one 
orbit wriggles a snake ; a pig's snout surmounted 
with antlers ; hideous swellings, grimaces patiently 
observed in the course of priceless tortures, a whole 
debauch of unknown horrors that begins to turn 
and wind, slowly, sacerdotally, according to evolu- 
tions whose form has probably not changed since 
this dread soil bred men. These ballets symbolize, 
at the two solstices of the year, the flight and return 
of a winter so terrible that demoniacal hatreds 
alone seem able to unloose it. And this dance is, 
beyond all, sinister, evocative of the pain and the 
darkness of the old cults. Organized for the 
inquisitive barbarian that I am, it is a mere diminu- 
tive of the biannual festival ; and its unwonted 
sounds make the yellow, half-fierce dogs that keep 
watch at the convent doors howl and rattle their 
chains. 



PART THE FOURTH: 
THROUGH DECCAN 



CHAPTER I 

DOWN TOWARDS SOUTHERN INDIA 



Here is Bombay once more, after a year's interval. 
The traveller has seen Calcutta ; opulent and chat- 
tering Bengal, lying between its quagmiry deltas 
and its mountains twenty-eight thousand feet high ; 
Benares, a religious hot-house, the centre of the 
immense Hindu world, a terrifying swarm of gods 
and men ; Agra, Delhi, Lahore, so different in the 
magnificence of their Moslem ruins, rich with all 
the glamour of poetry and glory, from Alexander 
to Shah Jehan ; Central India and Rajputana ; the 
almost never-visited temples of that Bundelkund 
where thirty-three native principalities still lay 
claim to their regal rights and where epic struggles 
and catastrophes took place beside which our 
Salamis and our Lepantos look like children's 
battles; Oodeypore, the white palace reflected in 
a lake strewn with eyots where palms grow through 
the marble of the cool arcades ; then the North : 
Kashmir, the land of flowers, forests and running 
waters; the plateaus of Baltistan, all bare in the 



286 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

silence of the lofty altitudes where the crows eat 
the eyes of the ponies, left to die by the wayside; 
the Indus with its glorious memories and its frozen 
waters ; lastly, higher still, where no Frenchman 
had yet set foot, the highest glaciers in the world, 
the Baltoro and the Biafo, overtowered by the 
mysterious summit of Mount Kanchinjanga, the 
second highest of the Himalayas, the eastern gable 
of the world's roof, which looks over the plains of 
China towards the distant Pacific. Then, through 
passes as high as the top of Mont Blanc^ where 
sometimes he slept in the snow, without tents 
because of the sloping soil, he came abruptly upon 
a new world : the valleys of Tibet, of Buddhist 
and polyandrous Tibet ; the prayer-mills under the 
apricot-trees; the alleys of vase-shaped tombstones; 
the mounds of stone all engraved with one master 
formula : " O the jewel in the lotus ! " Tibet with 
its monasteries perched upon corroded rocks, in 
salt plains marked with the hoofs of wild-asses. 
Next, down towards the South : the Lower Indus, 
with its torrid sands ; the sacred mountain of 
Girnar, still haunted by lions, whose promontories 
are saluted by the Malabar ships as they sail by; 
Abu, a dream of marble, sanctuaries carved like 
reliquaries, nimbuses of airy stone around the 
slumbering, enamel-eyed Buddhas ; Ahmedabad, 
another incarnation of the Moslem soul in an un- 
expected, delicate art, the monuments of which 
stain the yellow plains of Guzerat with roses. . . . 
Is that the end ? 



DOWN TOWARDS SOUTHERN INDIA 287 

No, there is never an end to this land of India, of 
which, to give a true impression, one must renounce 
the attempt to give an exact impression. For it is 
an accumulation of miracles, an overwhelming mass 
of wonders, an inexhaustible variety of forms, of 
origins, of ideas, of nature, an undrained treasury 
of original aspects, of unknown hideousness and of 
new beauties, a soil of infinitely diverse and varie- 
gated powers, which never repeats the same flower : 
mythologies within mythologies, races within races, 
worlds within worlds. Judgment abdicates its seat, 
reason suffers shipwreck, attention succumbs: one 
is no more than a waif of human curiosity, wild- 
eyed and tossed about, a vague notion of the 
immensity of the world and the complication of 
things, jolting in railway-trains, on camel-back, on 
elephant-back, on rafts of inflated goakskins or in 
bullock-carts. 



From Bombay itself — and the town is a very 
world, still unknown in spite of the prattle of so 
many passing through it — what things entreat you 
across the horizons of the East and South ! Here 
are Ellora, with its mountains cut into colossal 
sanctuaries, the marvel of India; Ajanta, where 
are the only frescoes that have survived of Indian 
painting, on the walls of the sacred caves; Karli, 
another monolithic nave, shaped Hke a basihca. 
Let us scale the Ghats, the formidable and almost 
perpendicular step which joins the vast table-land 



288 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

of Deccan to the alluvial shore of the Indian Ocean. 
From up there, to tempt you, I will show you "all 
the kingdoms of the world." At your feet lies 
Poona, the stronghold of that Mahratta power 
which subjugated India from sea to sea; over 
there Golkonda ! Bijapur will teach you an un- 
suspected art that took birth, ripened, then died 
with the glories and catastrophes of a forgotten 
dynasty ; so will Vijayanagar, in a depth of the past 
even more dim and more magnificent. Beyond 
are the great pagodas of the Carnatic, the most 
imposing places of prayer in the world, thanks to 
the prodigiousness and the massiveness of their 
monuments. Have you had enough of the work of 
men ? Would you behold the surprises of nature ? 
Up there, the undulating summits of the Nilgiri 
Hills, which hang blue over the elephant-reserves 
of Mysore, will reveal to you an unexpected Scot- 
land, with heaths and glens and northern flowers. 
However, strange tribes, Jewish in type, build 
their huts there : tribes whose language and origin 
will doubtless remain problems for all time. Further 
south, a river hurls itself from the gigantic step of 
the Ghats down a cataract of three hundred yards. 
And what is this breeze, laden with spices, that has 
wandered for days through the palm-trees ? It tells 
wonderful stories of long lagoons where the crabs 
peel the husks from the fruits of the cocoa-tree, of 
old Portuguese cities crumbling amid the tropical 
foliage, with their Jesuit churches, their convents, 
their scutcheoned mansions, their squares for the 
autos-da-fe. ... 



CHAPTER II 
KARLI— BIJAPUR— PONDICHERRY 



It is six o'clock in the morning before the great 
horse-shoe arch cut into the rock of the hill at 
Karli by masons who died eighteen centuries ago, 
at the time when the law of Buddha flourished in 
Hindustan. Six stone elephants guard the porch 
of the great nave that looks like an overturned ship ; 
and, at the back, around the ritual teak-wood 
umbrella, the first birds mingle with the last bats. 
Hanging strips of columns still hold to the vault 
by their capitals of kneeling elephants and form 
pendants. A tall pillar shoots up with a very 
Egyptian air and is crowned by four lions. Above, 
the blackening walls mount vertically, streaked with 
darker stripes covered with red, disordered grasses. 
And, up high, on the sky-line, three monkeys sit 
and watch us, their beards silvered by the slanting 
rays of the dawn. At the end of the plain, the huge 
red and yellow plain, loom the bastion-shaped, flat- 
topped hills of Deccan. 



290 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



An adventurer of royal blood left Constantinople 
one fine evening in the fifteenth century, penetrated 
to unknown India, where already the glory of the 
Crescent had preceded him, and founded a glorious 
line. Towns sprang up, nations submitted, nine 
kings succeeded one another until the day of the 
reverses, when, after the most dazzling fortune, the 
dynasty of Adil Shah succumbed and saw its last 
descendant, laden with chains of gold, bow before the 
throne of the Emperor Aurungzeb. A space of 
two hundred years sufficed to contain these heroic 
records. At my feet stretches what remains oi 
them, the astonishing poem of stone that is this 
town ofBijapur, the theatre of one of those tragedies 
of legend and time of which old India has so many to 
tell, in words often obscure and garbled, like those 
which come from the mouths of ancient grandams, 
to the pilgrims of her misery and her genius. 

I look over the flat country where once the aque- 
ducts radiated, amid the fig-trees, to the baths and 
fountains of the capital. Who would think that the 
majestic dome to whose outer platform I have come 
to see the sunset is, among all the masoned cupolas 
in the world, that which covers the greatest space, 
a prodigy of technical boldness realized according 
to the laws of the severest beauty ? It shelters the 
tomb of the seventh king of the dynasty and some 
others, including that of an adored dancing-girl. 



BIJAPUR 291 

From the travellers' bungalow, a former mosque 
profaned by the passage of infrequent officials and 
very rare visitors (for the daily train that goes to 
Bijapur is one of the slowest in Asia), I can see the 
gigantic curve dented against a sky all pale with 
stars. But now, inside the dome, I was listening to it 
filling with sound and ecstasy, a giant shell re-telling 
the music of the spheres. Surely this is one of the 
sublimest endeavours of ephemeral man to project 
himself into duration. The ethereal roundness of 
that immense vault suggests the folly of some demi- 
god who should have endeavoured to build himself 
a heaven. O striking individualism of Islam ! This 
mausoleum, the expression of the loftiest illusions 
of domination and pride, is balanced, at the opposite 
extremity of the town, by another tomb, built by 
the father of him who sleeps here, which, a mass of 
graceful domes, of ornamented and versicoloured 
stucco, with a stone lattice-work of Arabic characters 
punched out of flowered marble, proclaims its trust 
in death with a smile, in an outburst of gentle, 
decked grace, forming the most striking contrast. 
Nevertheless, of these two variations on the theme 
of Omnia vanitas, to the too conscious daintinesses 
of the Ibrahim Roza I prefer here the chaste and 
austere simplicity, the great stretches of wall, the 
eloquence of those joined spaces, encircled by a 
fillet heightened by a touch of paint, that real 
architectural beauty stripped of superfluous orna- 
ment, that ample, supple, full line, beautiful as a 
naked gesture. 



2 92 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



3 
What a charm lies in Pondicherry, that bit of old 
colonial France, the streets whose names are written 
in eighteenth-century characters, the grass-grown 
market-place, the quays waiting for custom ! True, 
a little more activity would please us : these placid 
inhabitants are too much like the shades of a 
neglected Elysium ; but how winning is the obsolete 
grace of this colonial gewgaw ; and hark ! Listen 
carefully and you shall hear the buzz of the adminis- 
trative music, the scratching of the pens and the 
creaking of the high-legged stools ! Sweet France ! 
She is at work ! Defying the East, the torrid 
climate, the wheels catch into one another and 
grind justice, health, all sorts of good things — even 
initiative, energy, valour, hope — which have passed 
too near and which this fine machine gobbles up at 
will. If you doubt the activity that reigns under 
this apparent torpor, listen to the coffee- coloured 
elector who serves as your guide : in his lisping 
French, he talks of the Municipal Council, of rival 
candidates for the Deputies, for the Senate, of the 
latest electoral jerry manderings ; and a blessed pride 
comes over you when you recognize those forgotten 
words and say to yourself that, if England has 
prosperity, we, at least, have politics. 

I suppose that you do not care to see the 
Governor ? Should you, however, through a sense 
of superfluous civility, go to the trouble of calling. 



PONDICHERRY 293 

you will expose yourself to learning that the first 
person who, in hospitable India, has not replied to 
your visit with an invitation is just the first of your 
fellow countrymen to whom you have paid that 
honour. Suppose that the hospital and the leper- 
house had been founded by a distant grand-uncle 
of your own and that you should express a wish to 
see them to a doctor who, as it happens, has known, 
in the Sudan, some old comrades-in-arms of your 
younger years. It will probably not enter his head to 
ask you to come to the Club in the evening to read a 
French paper and see a French face or two. . . . 

One would be tempted to be severe if one did not 
remember that it is not individuals that are to 
blame in this matter. Our race, first of all, like all 
those of fortunate lands, have no vocation for hospi- 
tality. Our colonial functionaries, on the other 
hand, ill-paid, recruited in the way which we know 
of, become morose before their time, addicted to the 
opium habit, livery and disillusionized. Is it their 
fault ? They work so hard ! It would, perhaps, 
be too much to expect them to show civilities to 
tourists, official or others. ... 

Meanwhile, the unwonted Angelus rings out from 
the steeple of the leper-house : 

Era gia I'ora che volge 11 disio 
Ai naviganti , . . 



CHAPTER III 
MADRAS— THE GREAT PAGODAS 



A CONCERT for the wounded in the Boer War. In 
the front row are the Governor of Madras and 

Lady H , who is attractive under an apparent 

official reserve. A similar shy charm used to 
distinguish a recent British Ambassadress at Paris, 
who had herself, before that, been Vicereine of 
India. Among the audience are a few natives of 
the well-to-do class who come to manifest their 
loyalty. 

The success of the evening is made by a whistling 
artist. He is recalled and gurgles // Bacio, that 
Italian waltz to which Patti loves to treat her 
audiences at the Albert Hall. General ecstasy 
ensues. If he were to play the guitar with his 
toes, his crowded hearers could not more eloquently 
give tongue to the sense of beauty that thrills them 
through and through. Staggering under this artistic 
shock, conquered, they settle down to listen to the 
manly accents of The Absent-minded Beggar, sung 
to a psalm-tune by a gentleman in evening-clothes. 



MADRAS 295 

as though the character of the thing did not demand, 
in its savoury vulgarity, some old khaki uniform, 
stained, tattered, with the forage-cap cocked over 
one ear and the plebeian and devil-may-care attitude 
of the typical Tommy! The ** Pay, pay, pay!" 
chorus assumes a new elegance in the mouth of this 
faultlessly-attired gentleman. A spiteful critic would 
perhaps see synthesized in it the ideal character of 
the war in question. To whom is this solemn gentle- 
man appealing in these Bible tones : the God of 
Armies or the Golden Calf? The answer to make 
to the spiteful critic is that he does not know what 
he is talking about, that the God of Armies and the 
Golden Calf form two separate entities only for 
analysts who are behind the times and that people 
who find a means of being honest, perfectly and 
serenely honest in their conviction of an accom- 
plished duty, in the midst of the universal outcry, 
are evidently very clever and much more than 
intelligent. By some marvellous alchemy, that 
which would constitute a scruple for people of more 
delicate stomachs is transformed, in their moral 
laboratory, into motives of action of the most sacred 
order. And they remain sincere, I repeat, in- 
corrigibly. 

One is always sincere, provided that he bases his 
conviction upon a profound instinct. Did not the 
spiteful critic confess to me that he felt an emotion, 
of a primitive order, it is true, yet an undeniable 
emotion, when listening to that warlike poetry ? It 
was an emotion of the same kind as that to which 



296 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

he owed "a little shock" when seeing pass before 
his eyes, some years ago, the pomp of the jubilee of 
a foreign queen. It was an animal sensation, no 
doubt, unless, indeed, it was of a very superior 
order, a sort of reflex of moral sensibility in which 
conspire the physical impression of the senses, the 
suggestion of the surroundings and an adaptability, 
too well exercised perhaps, to the methods of reflec- 
tion and emotion of the different races. But what 
a poor figure reason cuts in all this ! 



The concert takes place in a room adjoining the 
museum, the most complete, perhaps, in India, at 
least from the point of view of the southern districts. 
In addition to some very striking Buddhist low- 
reliefs, evidently modelled by a Greek artist who 
had come (after what adventures !) from Taprobane 
or the northern satrapies, it contains beautiful chased 
metals and, among other bronzes, a dancing Siva 
which recalls the great works of the Renascence. 
Such stray remnants as these bear witness to what 
the art of India was. From one end of the penin- 
sula to the other, the traveller assists at the tragedy 
of its death-agony. Native taste, systematically 
depraved by English influence, turns away from the 
past. The rich think only of aping the West ; the 
artizans, having no more customers, waste their here- 
ditary stock of skill and mechanical ingenuity on the 
making of bazaar-wares. All curiosity, every native- 



MADRAS 297 

rooted ideal has disappeared. The vile Manchester 
cottons invade the market, imitating, with this view, 
the models of other days, but not without risking an 
innovation from time to time. The director of the 
museum, a charming and distinguished scholar, who 
occasionally, in the intervals between his anthro- 
pological studies, finds time to deplore the death of 
Indian art, showed me a stuff from England the 
border of which represented a motive of bicycles in 
the loudest colours ! And this people has not even 
any code of artistic tradition. 

In spite of everything, when visiting the British- 
Indian section at our last exhibition, one received 
the impression of an attempt upon the moral person 
of a whole race akin to our own and constituting 
in itself one-sixth of the human species. The 
artistic effort of the country was symbolized by 
a few tins of curry, a'' piano in carved wood, some 
very badly-stuffed animals and the refuse of all the 
curiosity-dealers of Colombo, Delhi and Bombay. 
Had we searched carefully, we might, perhaps, have 
found copies of Raphael's Transfiguration executed 
by Httle babus in the famous " schools of art " of 
Jeypore and elsewhere. These institutions, the 
legacies of a Ruskinian viceroy, form England's 
triumphant reply to those naughty people who 
accuse her of neglecting the aesthetic culture of 
her subjects ! 



298 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 



You should see the great pagodas of the South 
to appreciate in its fulness the humour of that 
notion of setting little babus to copy Sanzio. , It 
would be almost vain to attempt to describe those 
pagodas, in spite of their common type, which has 
been christened by the naturally improper name of 
Dravidian. Our Graeco-Latin sense of measure, of 
proportion looks upon them with stupefaction, cries 
out for a lucid emotion. And it is not without a 
latent anguish that we at last abandon ourselves to 
the enormous religious intoxication which has caused 
to spring from the ground those pyramids of divini- 
ties and made those extravagant Olympuses taper up 
in the equatorial sun. 

Already there is something overwhelming in 
the effort to imagine a temple covering eighteen 
square miles, whose seven enclosures contain about 
twenty thousand human beings lodged according 
to their several castes. In the outer wall, which 
is like a rampart above which rise the colossal 
gopuras, bricks and brightly-coloured stuccoes, a 
gate, whose uprights are obelisks eighty feet high, 
gives access to passages like streets of inscribed 
stones, to halls of a thousand columns, to courts 
containing gigantic chariots, fish-ponds, tinsel idols 
streaming with butter at the back of dark re- 
cesses, porches full of the ear-rending clamour of 



THE GREAT PAGODAS 299 

sacred parrots in their cages, ornate sheds with sloping 
roofs supported by prancing monsters, black sanctu- 
aries whence a gong sends forth its moan, garlands 
and festoons, lamps hung from the wild gestures of 
sixteen-armed statues, flying processions carrying re- 
liquaries or barbarous instruments, a grave, compact 
crowd, evidently endowed with a sense of the divine 
totally foreign to ours, busying itself with minute 
rites, and, above all the other sounds, a cry as of 
shrill, irregular rattles, the perpetual, piercing screech 
of the bats of the temple. 

On the evenings of the great festivals, figures 
decked in sacerdotal jewels are led round on golden 
COWS) the three hundred bayaderes reel and whirl 
among the pillars of the myriad-columned halls. A 
great madness prevails. Siva is let loose: all quivers 
in the exultation of the god. 

He loves these frenzies. The snowstorms en- 
gulfed in his Himalayan caves, the typhoons on 
the Coromandel Coast, where the surging waves 
and the flashing lightning of the monsoon shake 
and envelop his domes gnawed by the sea, the 
battles of fire around his lava lingams on the 
brink of the craters of Java : these are his glories. 
Under his fulgurating voluptuousness, man is laid 
low like a prey. 

It is thus that he dances in bronze in the 
Madras Museum. Treading an enemy under- 
foot, himself erect in a circle of flames, with 
serpents at his wrists, a wide, grave, serene face, 



300 THROUGH ISLE AND EMPIRE 

a light drapery, like a vain pain, girding the 
cruel slimness of his loins, agile, superb, for- 
midable, an image of life at once intoxicated and 
absolved by the triumphant rhythm of its own 
beauty. 



THE END 



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